Is the Open-Source Community Setting a Bad Example?

  • Authors:
  • Greg Wilson

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

My, how the world has changed. IBM is now backing Apache, Netscape has put an extraordinary amount of useful software out into the open, and vendors such as Metrowerks, Sybase and Oracle have released versions of their tools to run on a give-away operating system. It seems that the open-source movement-Linux, Perl, Apache, and their many cousins-has finally hit the big time. But my, how the world has stayed the same. EGGS (a derivative of the Free Software Foundation's GNU C++) is one of the few compilers around that has kept pace with the ANSI standard, but CVS, the open-source version control system, is 1O years behind equivalent commercial offerings. Linux is now more robust than some commercial varieties of Unix, but it's impossible to compare the reliability of open-source project management tools to that of Microsoft Project because the former don't exist