>>Developing new technology is not cheap, especially if it is complex and without funding it's often incredible difficult >to have the people and drive to make innovations happen. The computer science field's been stuck in the mud for >the last 5 years with innovation and new anything going nowhere. I do blame the OSS movement for this because >most OSS projects look at existing technology, how to copy it and make it free. That ain't innovation.
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>First it is interesting to note that you give away some of your labor (SMTP). Did it lower the value of your other labors? Or did it help your status and make dollars? Maybe you have changed your mind about that decision?

That's really a different model. It's not Open Source or Free per say, but that's giving away a sample. That's really a completely different story than a product that is completely free. In my case the stuff I provide for free serves as marketing of a sort for the stuff that isn't free which seems a reasonable model for me - no pressure and it's an opt-in model - you don't have to buy anything but you get to try or use some other features for free.

>As to the general statement that new tech is not being done is just silly. I heard it many times. I say yes it's true that many existing FOSS projects have to catch up. But I believe it is false to say they are not innovating. Today we would not have tabbed browsers, we would not have the ODT standard. If you review what the window managers (KDE, Gnome) are doing you will immediately see where MS is getting ideas for Vista and windows 7.

Look at the software industry. For 20 years the field was growing by leaps and bounds. Things were changing, drastic improvements and innovations happened all the time. The last 9 years (since the dot com crash) have been at a standstill. The only big thing that came along in this timeframe is browsers embracing AJAX functionality and a whole new eco-system evolving around that but that's the extent of it. Innovation for big picture type improvements for computing for a large part has stopped.

>And if you take a look at MS. Where did their innovation come from. Xerox->Apple? What about word processors, speadsheets, Browsers - WordStar, WordPerfect, Visical, Jazz, Netscape. Yet you imply that MS is a innovator. If they are innovators then so are the FOSS projects.

Haeh? I didn't imply that. I said that it often takes money to be truly innovative and I'm not saying that MS has a monopoly here. But large companies often spend large sums on R&D to experiment and come up with new approaches to doing things.Many of the big computer innovations we use today come from R&D departments of large companies who dedicated and spend large some of money to think about the next big thing. It takes money to do this. Where do you get that in the OSS space?

Sure there's innovation in small companies but it's typically in using the existing infrastructure in inventive ways which again is a slightly different issue.

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>I don't see much of a difference between what MS is doing and FOSS at least when it comes to innovation. I see it as building on the shoulders of others.
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>I'd also say that most of the universities are using Linux to experiment with parallel programming which I see as the future.
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>BTW I submitted code to a FOSS project and it's being used. I could be the exception but I think there are 100's of thousands that are exceptions. I did it because I needed the code.


Sorry if this sounded confrontational - I actually meant this to be more broad and not pointed at you directly. But the general consensus is that people use OSS software and don't give back. Whether it's through submissions to help those projects or through donations.

+++ Rick ---