|
John Loiacono, Adobe's products executive, demotes FOSS- "Time is money," Loiacono said, linking to a blog by commentator Eric Vreeland, who observed: "Debugging recent installs of certain open-source software has wasted immense amounts of my spare time; charged at my hourly rate these hours represent a pile of cash bigger than that which full list-price versions of comparable commercial software would require for purchase."
Loiacono points to his open-source credentials as the top Sun software executive who oversaw much of that company's work releasing its Solaris operating system as open-source software.
"Obviously, I have thought about whether open source has a place in Adobe's creative products strategy. But what designers need is tightly integrated workflows and high reliability right out of the box, so the really important question to ask is: What's the impact to the user?" Loiacono said. "Open-source software can be a perfect solution. It's just not right for everything or for everyone — like many creative professionals who are on deadline and prefer to innovate versus integrate." Given FOSS supporters' claims that FOSS is the revolution of IT development and business, this is a big set-back. Would FOSS supporters tell Loiacono that his freedom to tinker outweighs any setbacks in the technology's performance, would they argue he's stifling free culture by not going open source, would the community claim that FOSS poses new problems for economics and thus time/money are not sufficient measurements for FOSS?
FOSS is simply a development process, with code deployed under a set of licenses that support service and complementary based business models. Its nothing more.
posted by Noel Le @ 10:55 AM | Free Culture Movement
Link to this Entry |
Printer-Friendly |
Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)
|
