The state of open source: Visions of utopia
Roundtable: 11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead
Follow @infoworldQuestion 6: If you could wave your wand and create the perfect software "universe," what would it look like?
Matt Asay
Vice president of business development
Alfresco
Asay: Everything would be licensed under an OSI-approved license, and preferably only a very few: MPL, L/GPL, and Apache. We'd compete on the basis of serving customers, not on our acumen in locking them in.
Chris DiBona
Open source programs manager
Google
DiBona: Ubuntu.
Bruce Perens
Creator of the Open Source Definition
Co-founder of the Open Source Initiative
Perens: A level playing field for proprietary software and open source. I'm not asking for any preference whatsoever, just fairness and a right to exist and operate for both open source and proprietary software. Because I think that on a real level playing field, open source would win most of the time.
Eric S. Raymond
Programmer, author, and
open source software advocate
Raymond: This is only an interesting question if we stick to technologies we know how to do, rather than muttering things like "strong AI solves the programming problem."
There would be two universal languages. One would be high-level, resembling Python or Scheme -- objects, rich type ontology, garbage collection. One would be low-level, like C but statically type-safe. Both languages would have strong notions of contract programming, for proofs of correctness and security properties. Either language could be used to extend or embed the other.
OSes in this perfect universe might be hyperevolved Unixes, but I think they'd more likely be capability-based persistent-object systems like Eros and CoyotOS that preserve Unix APIs as a fossil relic.
