Linked by David Adams on Tue 28th Oct 2008 16:14 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.
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Member since:
2006-09-21
A better example of an OS on a floppy would be the original Macintosh System Software. They managed to fit an entire GUI into a 400 kB floppy diskette and something like 64 kB of ROM.
I haven't played too much with Macs that old, but I have used machines that could fit the entire GUI and a modest sized application on a 800 kB floppy and 256 kB of ROM.
The big problem with finding innovation in the open source domain isn't finding it. The problem is finding innovations that people would want to use, because they want to use the sort of software that they are already familiar with. So desktops end up with the look and feel of Windows or Mac OS X, and OpenOffice is popular because it looks and feels a lot like Microsoft Office.
I've used open source programs that have no analogs, that I'm aware of, in the world of commercial software. A lot of that software is quite good. Take something like wmii as an example. But very few people want to use it because it doesn't work like the stuff they're used it.