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发信人: fkbch (心魔@笨愚斋@还有三门要考:_(), 信区: Linux
标  题: [article]why open source in winning --linux.com
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Fri Jun 11 08:01:18 1999)

Open Source is not just winning because it is "free" in a commercial
sense.

The real key to the success of Open Source software, such as the Linux
operating system, is the fact that nobody can control its fate except the
programmers. This is very, very unlike any product in commercial history.
Let's examine why this is so.

Look at the example of an actor in a movie. He (or she) can control what
happens on the stage, but once the film is cut, it is out of his/her
hands. The control of distribution, marketing, and cash flow is now in
the hands of managers, money men, spin doctors, and various other "suits"
who have nothing to do with producing the real product, the act of
acting. If a studio head decides to can the film and fire the whole crew,
the actor (with the occasional exception of a "big name" star with

a lot of pull) generally cannot do anything about it. Their hard work and
precise crafting of an alternative, heroic personality is doomed to the
discard bin by an act of managerial dictatorship. The suits rule.

A similar condition rules in the case of most software programmers. Once
Windows 3.1 was discontinued by Microsoft, it became harder and harder to
find it preloaded on a PC, sold in a store, or supported by hardware
makers and software developers. Did the programmers at Microsoft make
that decision? No, it was a handful of fat cats in the office of CEO Bill
Gates who dictated the future course of all that hard work and the long
hours spent by overstressed developers in Redmond, Washington. These poor
souls had no say in what happened to their work. It is as if years of
labor and intellectual exertion disappeared in a puff of cigar smoke.

Open Source means the power is now in the hands of the developers - ANY
developers, anywhere in the world, anyone who can get a copy of the code
on the Internet and who has the skill to program a good piece of code.
Furthermore, the distribution of open-source products is mostly
Internet-centric, meaning that there are seldom any "suits" who can
dictate the end of a great product, just because of some mythical
"obsolete" condition dictated by a sales curve. If there is a customer
out there, he or she can get the product and use it, no matter what the
big shots say.

This sort of worker-centric freedom is made possible by the openness of
the software codes under the Open Source regime, as well as the freedom
of the Internet distribution mechanism. It means that code survives based
on consumer demand, programmer affinity, and code quality, NOT on the
decisions of bureaucrats. This is as close to "power to the people" as it
gets in an industry that is increasingly dominated by money, monopoly,
and mouthy marketing.

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