Re: Talk for OSiM Asia

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 08:31 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote:
> I picked the word competition because in my experience most of this
> market is new to open source software and they're really worried open
> source means giving everything away, having no business advantage and
> no way to compete. There are obviously lots of businesses that
> successfully use open source software and compete in their industries.
> Note that they compete with proprietary solutions as well as other
> vendors that use open source software.

Agree very much with Stormy and please keep the word "competing" as is.

Below is unrelated, and more subjective.

> Stormy
> 
> On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 2:29 AM, Andrew Savory <me andrewsavory com>:
> 2008/11/6 Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>:
> > How about this?

> > GNOME Mobile: Open source enabling collaboration and competition


> If I were pedantic ... I'd suggest "Open Source enabling collaboration
> and innovation". I see OS as a good way to reduce competition (in
> favour of "co-opetition"), rather than enabling competion. 

Having worked a lot in both scenes, I actually disagree that in
opensource you see a lot more co-opetition than at commercial places. 

We, opensource folks, are very good at convincing ourselves that we are
so much better at collaboration because have this imaginary enormous
levels of non-competing c-opetition or 'cooperation by sharing'.

The reality is that we are among the most competitive individuals that
you'll find in technology.

Sure we share each other's code and ideas. And that's sometimes great.
But nonetheless, there's most definitely competition going on. And a lot
of it.

He who doesn't see that is just being blind for the facts, or being a
romantic idealist about opensource and free software.

Romance is for plays and movies. Idealism is great, but fanatic idealism
without compromises nor pragmatism is plain dangerous.

In the hypothetical unrealistic impossible case that somebody would
eliminate all competition within the opensource communities, all of
them, or even just ours, the GNOME one, I assure you all development
would abruptly and immediately stop completely.

Competition is burned and coded in our specie's survival strategy and
cultures. It's a great and vital component of humanity that without the
right pragmatism applied, becomes as dangerous as eliminating it would.

Compete on the things were your focus expertise lies, cooperate where
you can and want to cooperate. Competing doesn't necessarily mean that
you need to close code.

Sqlite is competing pretty hard with a lot of other embedded database
engines, yet most of the embedded ones are open.

I can give a lot of other examples, just like how I can give examples of
co-opetition too (of course).


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
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