Florian Cramer on Thu, 6 Dec 2001 13:15:02 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Free Software and the lack of cool artists and philosophers |
>From Martin Schulze's writeup of the 8th Linux Kongress: [Note: The Linux Kongress which this year took place in Enschede/Netherlands is the traditional, hardcore-technical meeting of Linux system developers. - Martin "Joey" Schulze is an important developer of Debian GNU/Linux and guru in #LinuxGER (IRCNet) and #Debian (LISC). -FC] > Also, interesting discussions about Free Software versus proprietery > Software came up ending in the question "Does Free Software actually > use its power to come up with impressingly new ideas and use the > freedom to implement and try them?"(*) An amazing (or depressing, for > what it's worth) number of Free Software Projects target at > reimplementing software that is already known in the commercial and > proprietary market. > > Since Free Software isn't bound to marketing droids and company bosses > dictating the goals and features of a particular software, it should > be perfectly suited to implement new ideas and come up with drastical > changes. However, looking at many Free Software projects this doesn't > seem to be the case. New questions came ub as: Why are companies > required to come up with new ideas so often? Why are special design > centers needed for a new GUI to appear? Maybe the Free Software > Community lacks a number of cool artists and philosophers? [...] > (*) Some new ideas that were invented through Free Software include > BIND (internet nameserver, without it, the internet wouldn't be able > to exist), c-news and INN (Usenet news servers, electronic bulletin > boards etc.), themes (themable widget libraries, think of Gnome and > KDE), Enlightenment (even though some people may miss some > functionality, but it's look is definitively new), X11 (the ability to > export displays over the network), xiafs (who of you does remember the > filesystem Frank Xia designed?), HTML (of course, crediting Tim > Berners-Lee), Emacs (ever saw a lisp interpreter that can actually > edit files? Lacks a decent editor, but hey...), Languages like Perl, > Python and Ruby. [Full text at <http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxKongress2001/report.html>] Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold