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Hayek Would Have Been A Firefox User
Submitted by Jonathan Wilde on Wed, 2004-11-10 05:12.
Randall posted earlier about the Firefox web browser's recent update. It was only after recommendations from my numerous open-source advocate co-bloggers that I switched to Firefox many months ago, and I haven't looked back. There simply is no comparison with Internet Explorer. Speaking as a non-techie, Firefox seems to be open-source movement's shining star, its first true mainstream success. Catallarchy's pageviews share for Firefox has reached an impressive 22%.
Remember when we were told that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was fundamentally anti-competitive? It seems that the obvious answer was to create a better product with a different business model. Though an anti-capitalist mentality underlies much of the culture behind open-source software, it is clear that the success of the development model is a free-market phenomenon. It flourishes because it takes advantage of decentralized knowledge coordinating resources in response to programming flaws, outside threats, and security holes. A million distributed sentinels keeping watch and cooperatively sharing information are more effective than a single searchlight no matter how brightly it shines. And at the heart of the open-source movement is a civil society of hackers with strong social norms that create and privately enforce special types of property rights. Reputation takes the place of traditional rewards to provide incentives.
Some skeptics of the open-source model have argued that the reason that Firefox shows little vulnerability to security threats is that it simply isn't successful enough to be noticed or exploited on a large scale. The time is soon coming when that theory will be tested, though I suspect that Firefox will pass with flying colors. It will bring down a behemoth, and in the process make a far-reaching statement about the future of software development.
The future road to surfdom is paved with distributed programming.
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Upgrades I just spent 5
I just spent 5 minutes upgrading my browser, Firefox, and email client, Thunderbird to their new releases and am enjoying some noticeable Firefox speed improvements and some improved management features in Thunderbird. If you use these programs upgrade...
Anti-capitalism is no more
Anti-capitalism is no more prevalent in Open Source than in the general population. Most Open Source software is simply something the author wanted to have but couldn't get "off the peg", so he went and made it.
If The F/OSS movement is
If The F/OSS movement is anything, it's not anti-market. What it's against is quite the opposite: lack of choice and real competition.
You'll find all sorts in there, ranging from anarchists and libertarians to reddest of red communists. What unites them is the idea that code is better off shared, and can compete if we want on how we sell and support that code as a product to the wider world. After all, there's people out there who will happily buy a copy of SuSE Linux because all the hard work of producing the commodity is done: building the kernel, admin tools, productivity software, &c., yet most of that stuff has its source freely available for hacking on or building yourself.
It's kind of like the reverse of the Tragedy of the Commons.
"Firefox seems to be
"Firefox seems to be open-source movement’s shining star, its first true mainstream success."
GNU/Linux?
MySQL?
PHP?
Apache?
In the world of servers and server-side support, these are as mainstream as duct-tape in a garage.
Tim, That's why I said
Tim,
That's why I said "speaking as a non-techie". :razz:
One could safely say that
One could safely say that Firefox is the open source movement's shining star *on the desktop*. The other apps that Tim mentioned are server apps, what I referred to in a ["previous post":http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2004/08/18/build-applications-not-infrastructure/] as infrastructure.
Since when is Linux a server
Since when is Linux a server app? Last time I looked, it was an OS.
GNU and Linux may not be
GNU and Linux may not be mainstream on the desktop (yet), but in addition to web and e-mail servers they also power a vast number of mobile phones, Tivos and other set-top boxes, wireless access points, and other devices that people interact with every day. Users may not know these embedded systems are running Linux (the manufacturers have no reason to market that fact), but it's still an important part of the mainstream consumer market.
You could make a similar argument about Apache, since it runs two thirds of all public web sites (even though most readers are probably not aware of it).