There's no shortage of open source programmers out there. According to a recent study of 5,000 developers by the research firm IDC, fully 71 percent said they used open source software, and half reported that use of open source was increasing within their organizations.
Outside of coding, however, few fields of endeavor have embraced open source practices on their own. Last week I mentioned how Sun and others have begun experimenting with open source practices for chip design, but if you stray from the realm of computing, you'll be hard pressed to find examples of similar principles in practice.
Graphic artists and designers, in particular, seem resistant to the idea of community collaboration. Sure, there are Creative Commons licenses available, but I haven't seen many examples of them in action among the graphic arts community. Where they are employed, they're usually applied to complete works by a single author.
But what about the other, more mundane applications of graphic design? Think about the icons, wizards, menus, templates, and other graphic elements that go into the applications you use every day. Nobody wins any accolades for drawing the picture of a globe that you click on when you want to add a hyperlink to your word processor document. And yet, today's GUI applications need these kinds of contributions almost as much as they need the program code underneath.
The Firefox Web browser is one of the most popular open source applications in use today, in addition to being one of the best funded and best marketed. And yet, even Firefox has struggled to add graphic polish to its menus and widgets.
For a while, the default user interface theme for Firefox was a set of icons called Qute, designed by Arvid Axelsson. When the Firefox team was unable to reach agreement with Axelsson about licensing terms for his copyrighted artwork, however, Qute was withdrawn and replaced with a different (and arguably less appealing) default.
Similarly, the licensing terms of Jon Hicks's familiar "fox around the globe" Firefox logo do not permit the logo's use in versions of the browser built from a modified source code tree. For this reason, many "strictly free" Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, omit the logo in favor of a more generic alternative. If they didn't, the logo would effectively limit how they could make use of the open source Firefox code.
What's the problem? It's tempting to assume that programmers must be inherently more altruistic than graphics designers, and that's why so much more code than graphics is available under free software licenses, but I doubt that's the case. In my experience, developers are often every bit as ego-driven as modern art painters.
This whitepaper explains the terminology and concepts behind Data Replication technologies and establishes some sizing rules through worked examples. Learn the new paradigm in disaster tolerance—protect data anywhere.
Download now »
Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. Another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.
Download now »
The emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.
Included in HP ProCurve WLAN solutions is security technology that alleviates threats from WLANs through:
* Monitoring wireless activity inside and out of the enterprise
* Classifying WLAN transmissions into harmful and harmless
* Preventing transmissions that pose a security threat to the enterprise network
* Locating participating devices for physical remediation
Effectively address data protection challenges, implementing solutions that help store and protect business–critical data while cutting costs and improving efficiency and reliability.
Download now »
Sign up to receive InfoWorld Resource Alerts
2 Recommendations
