Meanwhile, Tim O'Reilly and Eric Raymond, among others, have continued to promote open source. Predictably, they have also caught some flak for that. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that sort of carping. Those folks have been willing to stand up to the mikes, eloquent in the face of large and sometimes hostile audiences, and extremely energetic in promoting the open source story. Meanwhile, the results are starting to roll in.
Every week seems to bring another story of an open source offering.
From Apple to Netscape to The Open Group to Sun, companies and organizations seem to be getting it or at least moving in the right direction. Sun's recent announcement regarding StarOffice is particularly interesting. Here is a company that has been promoting licenses for Java and Solaris that are not quite open source. I listened to its reasons for the SCSL, but I was unimpressed. Sun simply didn't get it, and I didn't see its license meshing well with the independent nature of volunteer developers.