Tuesday 2 October 2012

MAYA and Trillions miss the point of OpenSource

So I've been reading the Trillions book at night and am starting to realize that the authors have a pet-hate with OpenSource.

They fall for all the cliches when criticising OpenSource and in a really weird and surreal way, they have not noticed that the Open Source development model is a real-world example of the Trillion node network they talk about (see When I think of Trillions, I think of Source Code Blocks).

Some of their comments on the fact that Open Source code is 'created by amateurs', 'have very little quality', 'does not foster innovation', are 'the reason our our TV crashes', etc...  are just silly  (it's like those chapters where written in early 2000s).

I guess nothing like that happens on proprietary world!!! which is famous for creating flawless software!

The bottom line is that there is good and bad with both worlds, and both (open and proprietary code) suffer from the 'Complexity and lack-of-engineering' problem, correctly identified by the authors.

I guess its the old saying '...Its hard to understand something when your income depends on not understanding it....'. 

Maybe the fact that MAYA is a commercial research center and they are paid to do research, means they don't like the open world of Open Source. Humm ... a search for Open Source and GitHub at Maya.com doesn't produce a lot of hits.... I wonder why?    :)

For me Open Source is much more than just sharing code. Open Source (even more than Free Software) is a way to share information, use the best technology out there and learn from the masters.

Btw, don't get from this post that I think the Trillions book is bad. Trillions is one of the best books I have read in a while (and you should read it), it is just that they Open Source ideas are completely bias and stereotypical