Reaction to “Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020?’’

This article brings me a lot of questions. But first, I did not even know that this kind of technology has begun in the 30’s. It seemed to me that it was younger than that. I wonder what was the utility of it in the 30’s. Maybe in the Second World War?? But even in that time, the computers that they had were big machines and looked extremely complicated to use.

Like it was said in the article, open source software is a way to innovate in the technology. Anybody who knows really how it works can bring his own knowledge to add something new, resolve a problem or simply improve the software, which is already there. With the numerous softwares that we have access today, everybody can have an active contribution to its evolution. The future of these programs is undetermined because there are so many changes everyday. Wikipedia is a good example. One day, we can read information on a page and the following day sometimes it is disappeared or corrected by any user of the website.

Are good or bad open source softwares? According to me, some softwares are good but others like wikipedia are bad because you can get wrong information. Another example are the lyrics website. In most of these sites, there is a notice at the bottom of the page, which says “ submit corrections”, for example:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/apologize-lyrics-timbaland.html

The last point that is really important about the open source softwares is the fate of the Software industry versus the Software society. Who will win this fight? Open source softwares take more and more place among the web community. Will they get the whole control of the web in 2020? Some people pretend that the open source softwares will get the control but according to me, the big industry will always get a certain power because it has been too much time that it works.