OStatic

This post by Dan Kusnetzky highlights one of the things that open source and free software projects have to contend with: Free isn't enough to carry the day.

A key challenge faced by any open source project is getting mindshare. It?s a truism that if decision makers don?t know about a product, they won?t consider it. If they don?t consider it, they?ll select other approaches. There are too many people shouting out their own Xen messages.

After a long search, the Linux Foundation has found its community manager for its LSB Developer Network. The Linux Foundation has tapped Brian Proffitt, longtime managing editor of Linux Today, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux.

OStatic: For readers who aren't familiar with Linux Today, could you give a bit of background on the site and yourself?

Brian Proffitt: Wait, who's not familiar with Linux Today? Are you kidding me? Have you been talking to those people at SourceForge again? Boy, what characters...

I?m a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developer?s Journals site. Harris says that ? KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn?t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.?

Now, a qualifier ? Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ?poisonous? users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ?contribute? to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesn?t need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.

Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.

Mike Gunderloy's post on FOSS Factory got me thinking about what Linux needs to gain mass market acceptance. After thinking about it, I've come up with a list of four things that the Linux community needs that aren't (as far as I know) yet in the works.

This isn't a list of impossible goals -- all of these things are attainable if the Linux industry and community were to decide that they are priorities. That's not to say that they'd be easy to accomplish, but the Linux community has proven good at working together when it's important.

Word around the campfire is that Microsoft is starting to get a bit impatient with Yahoo! That's a good thing, from where I'm sitting.

A report from Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog (on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web site) has the details, from an unnamed source.

It's been about 10 months since the Free Software Foundation released the final draft of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the license that is used by the vast majority of free software projects. The question since then has been -- will the community get behind the new license, or will they continue to use the GPLv2?

The answer seems to be a little of both. Palamida has been tracking GPLv3 adoption, and has a snapshot of GPLv3 adoption through March 28, 2008. Palamida has tallied 2,042 GPLv3 projects and 179 LGPLv3 projects.

Greg Bell's post on open source logos over on the OpenLogic site prompted me to think about open source branding in general.

Greg asks whether open source companies should approach logo design differently from proprietary software companies. Specifically, he wonders whether or not open source companies should be looking at open submission of logos and so forth.

This is a 1.0 that I wasn't sure would ever come. No, I'm not talking about the Duke Nukem game that's been vaporware for the last decade or so. I'm talking about Wine 1.0, which is slated for release on June 6th of this year. That's a mere 15 years after development was started.

Wine, if you're not already familiar with it, is an application that allows Windows apps to run unmodified on Linux and other *nix operating systems.

Anyone observing the open source community will tell you that open source is growing at an amazing pace. Specifically, the number of applications and the maturity of those applications are growing at an amazing pace. I could have told you that last week, but using anecdotal examples and data I have on hand from the openSUSE project. Now I can tell you that based on a study of 5,122 active and popular open source projects.