Tuesday, August 2, 2016
An Interesting Story behind Linux
Chapter 10 in Here Comes Everybody, among other things, discusses how a Finnish programmer's hobby project created the concept of open source software and kept Microsoft from holding a monopoly on server operating systems. His name is Linus Torvalds, and what he did was start the open source computer operating system called Linux. What was interesting about this is that Torvalds made everything he did able to be seen and added to by the public. It meant that people could voluntarily put as much time and effort into the project as they wanted and could alter it as they pleased. This idea of collaborative creation lead to many different kinds of computer programs that actually posed threats to sales of major software companies. What really piqued my interest here is the sentence "Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts but that because it is outfailing them" (245). What Shirky is saying there is that because it is not a commercial venture, there is consequence to failure other than learning what doesn't work. This allows for a lot of experimentation, trail and error, and innovations. These open source projects grow a little at a time, having many changes made to them, but only keeping the positive ones. This makes me wonder what other kinds of things could benefit from mass experimentation or something similar to the open source format? What do you think?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yeah, Linux is seemingly a threat to microsoft and apple, but up until recently configuring and setting up linux is much more complex than buying a computer from best buy. For the average user that only uses a computer for word processing and internet browsing, to change to Linux is too much effort, similarly to a user who uses an apple device for basic things does not need to jailbreak it to get more access to the OS. Also, Linux has thousands of different distributions which are all different in their own way, my favorite being Zorin OS which is a version of ubuntu. These structural differences can create compatibility problems and OS specific programs. Overall, open source programs and OSs threaten commercial products, but it is funny to mention this in the year 2-16. Before Microsoft and Bill Gates, basically everything was open-source. It wasn't until Bill Gates realized software could be packaged that he sold Microsoft and changed the software industry.
ReplyDeleteThe whole collaborative effort that he talks about with Linux is the same technique that Wikipedia uses. Open source and collaborative effort products are nice, but if they were the dominance in market share, then the economy would suffer since there are no costs. With no costs this means money is not being exchanged and less things are being bought which means there is less money going into taxes. Open source and collaborative effort is nice, just not necessary.
*2016
DeleteMaybe if an indie developer decides to make a game, but he/she does not know what to make the game about. They would be asking gamers what they like and do not like about a game. Eventually they would have an idea of what gamers want and will create an experimental game that was influenced by the gaming community. Hopefully this is an example of mass experimentation that makes sense.
ReplyDelete