Comments on: Open Source As A Personal Trainer

By: Gerry Van Zandt

Gerry Van Zandt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:33:47 +0000

Sorry … meant to say “NOT serving in this capacity” in the previous post.

By: Gerry Van Zandt

Gerry Van Zandt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:32:56 +0000

It’s an often — but not always — true premise.

As one example I’d put the GIMP up against Photoshop. I would say that GIMP is serving in this capacity against PS or other image manipulation software.

Cheers,
Gerry

By: James Governor

James Governor — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:22:41 +0000

not sure why i didn’t comment back before. dolt.

sogrady- ya think?

AJS – thanks! good analysis of proprietary solaris.

robin bloor- or just buy the personal trainer, as Oracle did…

McD – “Programmer’s like freely available and freely useable technologies… It costs down on costs in
every phase opf a project and it encourages the technology to be extended, maintained and supported. In IT, these are essential qualities of
an feasibility study for a “big wad of software”. – sounds like a redmonk comment

By: AJS

AJS — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 01:13:59 +0000

James, I completely agree. Sun, for all the great things they have done, got lazy near the end of the dot com boom. It’s easy to see why: they were making money hand over fist and their systems were in very high demand. This reduced their incentive to innovate as much. Linux has changed that and for the better. I see many more interesting new things coming out of them these days and I think Linux has given them the kick up the backside they needed. Free markets only work with vigorous competition and this example could apply to several other vendors too (look at IBM in the past couple of years). There always needs to be somebody keeping the buggers honest…

By: Robin Bloor

Robin Bloor — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:52:09 +0000

I read your blogpiece with amusement and interest. It made me smile.

The problem I foresee is that some of these enthusiastic personal trainers implement a pretty rigourous exercise regime that has their unfortunate clients heaving for breath. And once you’ve acquired such a relentless personal trainer, there’s no easy way to get
off the treadmill. A coronary is indeed a possible result, even for those unwitting slouches that were once as fit as a fiddle. Sadly, we can expect to see many of these once fine athletes collapsing under the strain.

I envisage wards full of these unfortunate casualties hooked up to life-support systems – with debates raging as to whether we should bear
the cost of such expensive medicine or simply disconnect.

If you like, I’ll join you in writing their obituaries, when the situation arises.

By: sogrady

sogrady — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 08:32:23 +0000

Mono training Java, perhaps?

By: McD

McD — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 05:12:18 +0000

Personal favorites… Open Source projects spawn imitators too. When Sun bought some developer product companies like Forte, NetBeans, and NetDynamics (through the Netscape deal with AOL that led to iPlanet) they tried to figure out how to make money with tools… Paul Butterworth of Forte and a few others told Sun that you can’t make money with tools… at least not a lot of money. But you MUST have tools. So, the Netbeans.org project started.
It gained significant mindshare until IBM countered the same idea but more funding and marketing muscle… Eclipse (pun likely intended).

So, the idea of open source to drive developers has been a driving marketing strategy for many years… Unix, TCP/IP, NFS, Mosaic, Java, perl, PHP, Python, yada, yada all fit into this model.
Programmer’s like freely available and freely useable technologies… It costs down on costs in
every phase opf a project and it encourages the technology to be extended, maintained and supported. In IT, these are essential qualities of
an feasibility study for a “big wad of software”.

We all need tools…