| First, even though I disagree with several of your points (GNU vision failure, your teleological view of innovation), I don't disagree with all (what's good for Google, #2 being strong currently). Change (innovation) is hard to predict, and tends to happen in areas we least expect[1]. In particular, I fail to see why the people in the Free Software community would be any worse than those doing similar work in the corporate or government environment in security or other areas. In fact, there are several data points that suggest that are better in some areas. The fallacy, I suspect, is the assumption that those supporting the "GNU vision" are a distinct group from the others, when in reality there is a lot of overlap between your three categories. A good example is IBM, who - upon remembering they are in the business of selling "solutions" and service contracts - opened up a lot their software, and participated a lot more in the FS and OSS communities. Also, I'll mention that we should hope some version of your "GNU" future happens, at least where communications over the internet is concerned, as "proprietary" and "encryption" don't really work together if you ever want to trust it. An alternative, vision of the future you may want to consider: most software is (and will be) fancy plumbing. In each field, once you have the initial discoveries made (e.g. Knuth's tAoCP, the basic hydrological theories necessary to move water that we take for granted today) the rate of real discovery slows down considerably and becomes much more specialized. Innovation happens in both. New valves and fixtures are made, etc, but most of the time you just need to hire some plumber to setup your building, or you need to hire some software professional to keep your data backed up and your invoices generated properly. To achieve this, just like how "standard parts" are far more common than proprietary parts in plumbing, having an free and open body of software to draw on makes the equivalent job in software far easier, too. I suspect this will be true with the internet and without. None of this suggests the corporate or government players will go away - they will simply gain the benefits a free and open library as well. [1] first paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Con... |
While this future would be advantageous for me, I am not sure I am onboard with everyone being responsible for their own infrastructure. Not only is it quite wasteful in terms of physical resources (and very sub optimal on energy consumed), but it requires that every individual community have several experts with a high degree of skill (for reasons previously discussed of which I see no actual rebuttals)
> To achieve this, just like how "standard parts" are far more common than proprietary parts in plumbing, having an free and open body of software to draw on makes the equivalent job in software far easier, too. I suspect this will be true with the internet and without.
This is not an impossible future, but people have talked about it over and over, and every time a new language or paradigm comes out that is supposedly the "key" to unlocking truly modular and reusable software. Heck, even Brad Cox thought he was doing it with Objective-C and look at how much code is duplicated between iPhone apps.