Wednesday, February 15th, 2006, 7:07 am
Ever-Lasting Open Source Projects
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When one projects builds directly upon another
PEN-SOURCE software development models are said to be poor. Some would argue that they suffer from sudden discontinuation of projects which people truly rely on. There is a fallacy which suggests that non-profit project ‘die’ more often. The GPL , however, makes the contrary a truth.
Take WordPress for example. It is a predecessor of b2, which became dormant in the past. Netscape and its evolution towards Mozilla and Firefox resulted in what is arguably the best Web browser, among many browsers in existence. AbiWord, KOffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice share some common fundamental codebase and they all (if not most) are here to stay. This comes to show the power of looking upon the shoulders of others, constantly extending in this code-driven community.
My favourite Open Source initiative is probably KDE. K in KDE stands for “Kernel hackers” (arguably so) and I believe it holds much promise. One day, it might even serve as the front-end in most workstations worldwide, possibly under a different name (a successor project). On the contrary, commerical
software out of use is disposable POS on the shelf. It is plenty of work that is simply wasted.
As tribute to KDE, I recently posted a KDE translucency illustration (local copy of screenshot) to the KDE Web site.
February 19th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Ever-Lasting Open Source Projects
Everlasting is a long time….