@Ian, I think it's naive to say that most projects are to build a fun aplapcition and no more than that. We're complex animals, and we have lots of motivations. If we just wanted to build a fun aplapcition, why make it open source? Why invite people to collaborate with us? It seems to me that quite often we do these things because we want the aplapcition to have wide distribution, to benefit from other people's skills, or to improve our own sense of self-worth or reputation. That's quite apart from projects that have an external political goal or the like: I'm talking about projects that eg. provide a free version of something that's encumbered with patents or other IP restrictions (Ogg players would be an example of this) or to promote a social good (eg. the OLPC). And that's before we even go into free and open source software released by businesses to improve their reputation or interest people in their commercial offerings I'm talking about anything from Open Solaris on down.To be honest, I'm having trouble thinking of *any* open source software that doesn't have some sort of social goal in addition to a pure software creation goal.
wmRbzXeXRsThrmsx
Date: 21 August 2012 07:04 (UTC)