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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (52494)	11/1/2000 12:45:08 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Triumph of the free-software will The passion of open-source hackers may make their success inevitable. Impugn it at your peril. By Andrew Leonard salon.com Open-source software, at heart, is a method for maximizing the efficiency and speed with which one can create the next version. Release early, release often, is the mantra, meaning get your new code out into the public so millions of eyes can tear it apart and help create a new version even faster. The success of this strategy with Linux, Apache or any other open-source software program seems to have had a psychological effect. One could argue that open-source developers understand the inherent imperfection of software better than anyone: They know that even if they don't move the mountain (or Microsoft) with their code, then the next generation of developers will succeed. As a consequence, they have created what they believe is the strongest system for continuously improving code. The step from faith to passion is easy. If you believe that your way is the best way to achieve a given end, then that fuels your determination to practice what you preach, to distribute your code freely and frequently. If enough people agree with you, then you have a movement, a self-fulfilling prophecy of software development, a way to will things into being just as the old man willed his mountain to disappear. Certainly you don't need to steal somebody else's code or crack someone else's internal network to achieve your will. And while plenty of my correspondents assured me that the very idea that they would even want to look at Microsoft's source code was anathema to them -- that, in effect, to break into Microsoft to steal code would be analogous to breaking into a sewer to steal excrement -- I think that particular point of view actually belongs to a juvenile minority. The majority believes in the process, and, understandably, any suggestion that they might seek a shortcut to success impugns that belief -- and their own passionately held values. Thanks to wired.com