I agree that the open source developers need money to live. However, corporate world was hijacked by a narrow vision of keeping everything closed. It did work well for sometime. Now we are seeing a paradigm shift. Companies are embracing open source in big numbers. If Microsoft is trying hard to get into OSI, it speaks volumes about the direction the IT world is going to take. Big money acquisitions like Mysql will help create a climate where corporate world will thrive with an open source approach. It is just a matter of time before proprietary format is relegated to where typewriter is today.

I agree with you about the spelling and grammer aspect in the creative writing process. Blogosphere is not creative writing. It is just a bunch of thoughts put out in open for people to discuss. Neither the scientific community nor the tech blogosphere worry so much about cosmetic things. I would rather spend my time on the content than spelling and grammar. When I write a blog post on the run, before I forget the idea that just splashed and which I think is worth discussing, spelling and grammar are last of my priorities. I am not writing a book to win pulitzer award. People like Phosphordyson are just immature people as far as I am concerned. It is just the case of priorities. I can hire someone paying $10 per hour to write articles with good spelling and grammar. You don’t need brain to do that and just a hand to type will be more than enough. However, you cannot pay $10 to someone and get the ideas. So our priorities are different. Hope I have put my point correctly.

In our current economy, it’s very hard for open-source to fluorish with original ideas. Without donations, where will the developers and researchers get the money to support themselves and their projects? This certainly takes away from the ability and aptitude of an open source development scheme to create original ideas. In theory, open source is the best way to deal with scientific and research issues, but in our current political state, things are just hard. I wholeheartedly agree with the wisdom-of-crowds approach, but it would be nice for more corporate funding.

I’m just speaking in theories, though. Maybe I have no place to agree or disagree without my own experience.

Proper command of spelling and grammar is different from being a good scientist. Many scientists have a form of dyslexia, but that didn’t stop them from being scientists.

1) Don’t even worry about pointing out spelling and grammatical errors. It is for kids to worry about

2) Before calling any argument weak, try to show it is weak. As long as it is not done, your comment deserves nothing in response.

First off, I’m not quite sure if it is due to the limitation of the software you use, but your reply is exceedingly difficult to read because it is so poorly formatted.

Second, your reply contains numerous spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, showing a lack of professionalism and polish. I find it difficult to believe that you have spent all those years in academia without learning how write properly.

Third, the reply is disorganized and lacks a coherent point, are you attempting to discredit Mr. Lanier’s association as a premier scientist or are you trying to argue that academia offers an “open source” model? Either way, both arguments are weak.

If you actually read Mr. Lanier’s article more closely, he is not arguing that Open Source is inherently bad, but that the whole Open Source movement has been attempting to replicate existing technologies (many of them originally closed sourced) instead of trying to innovate. Mr. Lanier is by no means wrong, whatever his credentials may be. Linux is a replication of Unix, the GNU project has replicated the existing editors, libraries, compilers, and toolset commonly found in UNIX. X, Gnome, and KDE have replicated the GUI popularized initially by the Mac and later by Windows. Many of the tools in the open source community, such as 7-Zip and Filezilla, are recreation of commercial apps such as Winzip and CuteFTP.

As of true innovation within software such as the Relational Database, the Spreadsheet, OO languages, presentation software, graphics software, the web browser etc., all of these were essentially popularized initially by commercial closed sourced companies. In other words, there has been really little innovation in terms of a radical design in the Open Source community that has gained any significant momentum.

However, Mr. Lanier is not completely correct. One may argue that the open source software community has produced something that is truly innovative in the form of Apache and other server sided technologies. Apache was the first truly robust, multiplatform web server in existence and its continued evolution and popularity has not only spawned countless websites, but a whole technological eco-system. Its modular nature has allowed the proliferation of server side technologies and provided a common platform for web applications.

In essence, Mr. Lanier is complaining about the lack of innovation within open source software in general. However, I find that Mr. Lanier’s metrics are too demanding. By his metric, there is relatively little innovation in ANY given field, whether it be academia (Richard Feynman once complained that in physics there were very few original fashionable ideas but lots of followers of those ideas) or within technology (notice how every popular language with few exceptions is ALGOG derived and follows the basic OO semantics, or that we are still stuck with the concepts of CPU, GPU, memory, and IO devices in today’s computers, a design that is well over fifty years old). Mr. Lanier’s arguments are based on selective examples, and do not take the history nor the context in which innovation occurs.

In the future, when rebutting someone else’s article, please attempt to do so in a more coherent, thought out fashion. One should expect a modicum of professionalism…