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0 pointsrjzzleep4y ago0 comments

In my opinion Filo is completely off base. It's the Americanization of Open Source. Notice some of the OSS conferences in the US are big sponsored events by O'reilly, to some extent big recruiting events.

Contrast that to FOSDEM, which is completely different. This isn't just an offspring of early hacker culture. This is as offspring of how "socialist" european university systems were.

A lot of bigger OSS projects were started during peoples university time and what's so fundamentally different between how universities in Europe were before? You didn't have care about graduating. Some people stayed in University for 10 years, it was free and sometimes even had some benefits, like cheaper healthcare.

Now studying forever subsidized isn't always a good thing, but it has some nice side effects, like being able to work on your side project without having to worry about your livelihood(something that is unthinkable in the US).

The European higher ed systems has gotten more and more close to the US system with the Bologna process[1].

Most Americans immediately think about how to monetize things, and don't get me wrong, being able to live off of your open source project is nice, but it wasn't the focus in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process

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9 comments · 3 top-level

wmf4y ago· 3 in thread

Do European students run critical infrastructure? Because that's where the real problem is.

zwaps4y ago

Lots of things run on Linux, which was Torvald's thesis project at a European university.

Which, by the way, took 8 years... typical length for European's who really don't feel like graduating (back in the day).

It's a bit out there, but I do believe there is some truth to op's points.

wmf4y ago

Linux has been developed by paid professional developers for 20 years or more. I agree that the European university model is interesting for initial R&D, but things have to professionalize over time.

rjzzleepOP4y ago

How about Linux? KDE and by extension WebKit/Blink(KHTML)?

raverbashing4y ago· 2 in thread

This is an interesting aspect, and some good projects do come from Europe

But open source projects still need a roadmap, focus and maintenance, regardless of how they are funded.

phoronixrly4y ago

Whether a project needs those things is up to its author(s) to decide. If you don't agree with them you're welcome to fork.

raverbashing4y ago

If you want a real project then you need those

If you just want to share code, that's fine as well, but that's not an OSS project (sure, it can be an open source "project" - but not a project that grows)

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blihp4y ago· 1 in thread

It's not as if this was something that started elsewhere and is being adapted to the American value system: Free Software / Open Source started in the U.S.[1] That's largely due to the fact that for the first couple of decades of it's existence, Internet access[2] was heavily concentrated in the U.S. as it was originally a U.S. government funded project. There are a variety of factors that have changed the open source ecosystem, Americanization isn't one of them. Quite the opposite: if anything, Open Source has been globalizing over the past 25 years or so.

[1] Free Software originated with GNU which was started by Richard Stallman, an American at MIT. Open Source originated in Palo Alto, CA as an alternative (less political, more business friendly) approach to Free Software. There was freely available software prior to the formalization of terminology and licenses from organizations like FSF and OSI, but even then most of it was from developers in the U.S.

[2] Prior to the Internet, most open source projects were heavily concentrated in the U.S. as large scale distributed projects weren't a thing until the 90's with widespread availability of Internet access.

mistrial94y ago

I was in the room with Richard Stallman, in Palo Alto, in the 1980s, as he gave a careful and serious presentation to about twenty chosen people.. from my point of view, the statement above does show one part of the OSS evolution. Meanwhile, the "net" was growing as a combination of ex-dot-mil and their allies, and people who were deeply committed to signals, evolution and in most cases math or physics training, for its own sake, and the social evolution it implied (science fiction readers and highly creative signal processors like musicians but different).

both sides of this odd couple had different motivations and restrictions, but they cooperated in building the network and the software that ran the network. People here have complained, but I claim, TCP/IP was not the only network game in town then, and the massive scaling that you see today was not done yet, and did not work for lots of reasons. Many OSS projects related to the network itself, the signals across the network, and math/science. The media world was largely influenced by commercial print and Hollywood, and was less influential in the early days, as they stuck to the commercial distribution mechanisms. Network media tended to be odd, music-oriented, or sick things, in those early days. Also note that single, massive source code repos were not a thing, so people traded "tarballs" with important releases of whatever.

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