Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Red Hat Exec: Hackers Still Important
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Volunteer hackers still play an important role in open-source
> | software development despite the many companies that pay developers
> | to work on open-source products, according to Michael Tiemann,
> | Red Hat's vice president of open-source affairs.
> `----
>
> http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=24334
>
> Surely, closed system cannot thrive on hackers and volunteers, whether they
> test (security) or even improve and extend.
What makes you think they are "volunteers". Most of them are
consultants, IT professionals, system administrators, and other highly
skilled professionals who are solving problems for their businesses,
clients, or employers, and sharing these solutions with others in the
same situation, who share their solutions.
The down-side, some of these solutions are initially very "rough"
because they are written for administrators who don't need ultrasmart
hand-holding graphical user interfaces. They are refined over time,
and often made "marketable" by companies who resell them as products
like F-Secure.
The up-side however, is that very often, solutions to problems can be
found among the contributed software, implemented in a very short
time-frame (no complex GUI to learn, just some basic documentation),
and can be "dressed up" as time, resources, and priorities permit.
Students still contribute, as do amateur programmers, but often they
are encouraged, by their teachers, to implement programs based on
published specifications such as IETF specifications or X/Open
specifications, or other public domain specifications. This makes the
resulting implementation "patent proof", because it was intuitively
derived from publicly available knowledge. Furthermore, the teacher
may end up with as many as 30 different implementations, all of which
meet the specifications. The teacher usually encourages the authors of
the "A" assignments to publish their implementations to school
archives, which then get published to other public archives.
Early car makers, especially in Europe, often locked the trunks of
their cars, to prevent any mechanic from fixing the car improperly.
Ford, and other American car makers, designed their cars to be repaired
by high-school drop-outs. These drop-outs often found ways to increase
performance or economy (depending on the priorities of the period) of
automobiles, and these innovations were often later implemented by the
car makers.
Fuel Injection, electronic ignition, and many others were based on
technology originally created by these mechanics. The engineers made
them safer and more reliable.
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