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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 18 Jun 2013

Taken: 18 Jun 2013

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Open Source / Google

Open Source / Google
Fire up your home computer, for example. When you visit Web to check the weather forecast or order some sneakers, you might be using Firefox, a free open-source Web browser created almost exclusively by volunteers around the world. Unpaid laborers who give away their product? That couldn’t be sustainable. The incentives are all wrong. Yet Firefox now has more than 150 million users.

Or walk into the IT department of a large company anywhere in the world and ask for a tour. That company’s corporate computer servers could well run on Linux, software devised by an army of unpaid programmers and available for free. Linux now powers one in four corporate servers. Then ask an employee to explain how the company’s website works. Humming beneath the site is probably Apache, free open-source Web server software created and maintained by a far-flung global group of volunteers. Apache’s share of the corporate Web server market: 52 percent. In other words, companies that typically rely on external rewards to man age their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.

And it’s not just the tends of thousand of software projects across the globe. Today you can find: Open-source cookbooks; open-source textbooks; open-source stock photography; open-source prosthetics; open-source credit unions; open-source cola; and for those for whom soft drinks suffice, open-source beer.

This new way of organizing what we do doesn’t banish extrinsic rewards. People in the open-source movement haven’t taken vows of poverty. For many, participation in these projects can burnish their reputations and sharpen their skills, which can enhance their earning power. Entrepreneurs have launched new, and sometimes lucrative, companies to help organizations implement and maintain open-source software applications. ~ Page 22
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . the ubiquity of the search engine has given rise to a widespread anxiety that search has become a mentality, a mode of reading and learning that is supplanting the old modes, bringing with it a host of cataclysmic ills. It is, we are told, changing our brains, shortening our attention spans and eroding our capacity for memory. In literature, the novelist Will Self has declared that the serious novel is dead: we no longer have the patience for it. This is the Age of Distraction, and it is the search engine’s fault. A few years ago, an influential article in the ‘Atlantic’ asked the question, ‘Is Google Making Us Sutpid?” and the answer, strongly, in the affirmative. ` Page 9
9 months ago.

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