Open Office, and OSS fears

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 08:11:56PM -0700, Steve wrote:
> A fear of mine has been that as open source becomes more popular, the
> mooch factor of thinking that 'somebody else will do it' becomes
> dangerously large. 

I think this fear is 100% unfounded.  It fails to recognize an
important feature of the Open Source community: we write free software
because WE LIKE IT.  I am an example of this.  I wrote rssh[1], NOT
because I had a personal itch to scratch, but because it seemed like
an interesting project to work on, and because doing so improved my
knowledge of certain security principles and programming techniques.

OO is an important software package to the Free software world; if Sun
abandons it, I believe it will be picked up.  Many important free
software packages have been abandoned in the past, but they always
seem to be revived.  A recent example is FreeSwan.  Obviously, with
minor software packages, this is not always the case.

----
[1] rssh is a shell which allows you to limit ssh access to scp and/or
sftp, and allows you to set up ssh access to a chroot jail.  It's
available here:  http://www.pizzashack.org/rssh/

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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