[Gllug] "Open source has its own problems" - article in Computing

John Edwards john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk
Thu Aug 4 15:58:40 UTC 2005


On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 04:12:55PM +0100, Benedikt Heinen wrote:
<snip> 
>> Innovation - OSS is mostly just rip offs of proprietary software
> 
> This works both ways - there was open source stuff that made it into 
> mainstream, as well as closed source being "copied".
> 
> e.g. I loved VMware when it came out - and I wish VMware the best of luck 
> in their work; so I didn't think it was a good/ethical move by some open 
> source people to start FreeMWare/Plex86, which was clearly aimed to do 
> what VMware was doing.
> 
> In this case, VMware invested money and proved the concept to work, and 
> then open source went in to start something similar.
<snip>

That's not really a good example, as Bochs predates VMWare.

The VMWare people were researching virtual machines while at Stanford 
University, and I think where was some influence from IBM's work on 
virtualisation, so you could say that they also supplied some the money 
to prove the concept.

That said VMWare is a very polished package.


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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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