On Fri, May 8, 2015 07:59, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The difference is that a large portion of the FOSS corpus, if not a preponderant majority, is ultimately dependent upon the interest of the people responsible for its existance and not the people using it. Once a project's core team either loses enthusiasm for something, or have otherwise moved on in life, their project oft-times is left without any meaningful support.
If a project is backed/picked up by a corporation, say Redhat or Oracle, or a foundation, say Apache or LibreOffice, then it may have a future more or less independent of any single individual or group. Otherwise it does not.
On May 8, 2015, at 10:24 AM, James B. Byrne byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca wrote:
Commercial software and company-backed F/OSS software gets abandoned all the time.
- OpenOffice may well die due to brain drain from LibreOffice. They’ve both got big corporate backers.
- The MySQL mailing list is getting a tiny fraction of the traffic it once enjoyed before the Oracle takeover; MySQL won’t go away any time soon for reasons of inertia, but MariaDB and NoSQL are surely taking large bites out of its user base.
- Remember ESD and aRTS? They’ve all but been killed off by PulseAudio. They were the “standard” of their time, backed by major Linux distributors.
- How many “standard” window managers has GNOME had over the years?
- How many desktop managers and GUI toolkits preceded GNOME/Gtk? NeWS, NeXTSTEP, CDE/Motif, Tk, all with big-name support in their day.
- Adobe’s killed off dozens of products over the years. FrameMaker, Director, Flash Builder, PageMaker, Contribute, Fireworks…
- Got a smartphone? How many apps have you bought that never went anywhere after they got your money? There’s more than one in my case, at least.
At least with F/OSS, you have the option of taking over maintainership of an abandoned code base. My company has done that a few times now, as it was easier to do that than switch to the abandoned package’s replacement.
On May 8, 2015, at 12:02 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
When I think of FrameMaker, I think of the program that started out on Solaris, then moved to other big iron Unices and OS X. Wikipedia informs me that it’s been Windows-only for about a decade, which must be how it dropped off my radar.
Still, it’s good to know the old thing is still shambling along in some form. I was impressed with it when I used it way back when.
On 5/8/2015 12:47 PM, Warren Young wrote:
That does bring back memories of Solaris and Framemaker from the mid 90's. We had folks using Frame as a word processor, absolutely insane, especially since they had Applixware (originally Aster*x) installed on the same machines. Fun times! -- //steve
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James B. Byrne -
John R Pierce -
Steve Lindemann -
Warren Young