Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 January 2009 10:47
Opinion and Analysis
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When Bdale Garbee speaks, people in the free and open source software worlds stop and listen. Let me reword that a bit - when Bdale Garbee speaks, people in the technology industry stop and listen.
The man has an impressive CV - his first contribution to an open source project was 30 years ago and he is the open source and chief Linux technologist for Hewlett Packard.
A contributor to the
Debian GNU/Linux project since 1994, Garbee has also been leader of this project, and currently is chairman of the Debian technical committee and also the acting secretary.
Hence, it came as no surprise that his talk on "Collaborating successfully with large corporations" at the
Australian national Linux conference in Hobart today was well attended.
Garbee pointed out ways that FOSS and companies can find a workable middle road - and he should know as he has been with HP, which has been a very successful player in the FOSS space, since 1986.
He pointed out some major differences between the way that FOSS and proprietary software is built - open source developers create software to scratch an itch (fulfill a need of their own), do not work to a strict schedule ("I work on free software during every spare minute") and are into collaboration or sharing.
Proprietary applications are written to a schedule and have a ship date right from day one. There is no question of sharing code.
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