I recently joined the legions of Americans upgrading their TV sets, trading in my trusty and still functional (but awfully faded) 20-year-old RCA box for a fancy new Pioneer plasma display. I’m the sort of consumer-electronics purchaser who actually reads the manual; flipping through the Pioneer’s book, I nearly jumped out of my seat when I discovered the entire text of the GNU Public License. Yes, it seems that somewhere in its innards, this TV is running Linux!
In other open-source news, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting lead piece the other day about Zimbra — the open-source challenger to Microsoft Outlook ‘n’ Exchange. I’ve followed the Zimbra saga from afar because the product is in certain ways a competitor to Chandler, the project whose story I tell in my book. (Yes, Zimbra’s name derives from the Talking Heads song, which is in turn a borrowing from Dada poet Hugo Ball.) The Journal piece, by Robert Guth, was a thorough description of how a modest-sized startup company is leveraging the work of an open-source community.
What I found strange about it wasn’t the idea that, nearly a decade after the concept of open-source software development was first introduced to the mainstream (and almost as many years after Andrew Leonard’s groundbreaking work on the subject at Salon, that I was proud to edit), the whole idea can still be framed as a novelty. No, what was really off about the piece was its headlines: “Virtual Piecework…Trolling the Web for Free Labor.”
I suppose there is still a faction in the software world that dismisses the complex social and behavioral structures that have created substantial software products like Firefox, Apache and the Linux in my TV set; in this view, open-source developers are simply chumps who give away “free labor.” And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that stance echoed in the Journal. But I was anyway. Guth’s piece was a smart introduction to the process — at once idealistic and pragmatic — of distributed open-source software development; the reductive headline was jarringly disconnected from the content that followed.
[tags]open source, linux, plasma tvs, wall street journal[/tags]
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