Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The slow and steady tsunami of Open Source

Recently I have started reading some materials I should have read over a decade ago. It is the essay collection The Cathedral & the Bazaar that is written by Eric S. Raymond and, the many authored, Open Sources. Perhaps it is lucky that I didn't read the books back then because it might have lead me to have an even bushier beard and running down the street screaming at people that the source code should always be available (it always should).

When I was a teenager I was dimly aware of the Open Source revolution that was happening. I have a friend that was more in tune what was happening then I was and he introduced me to Linux. It didn't take long for me to get hooked and I have been a proponent of open sourced software ever since.

However supporting an idea and keeping track of the progress is two quite separate things and I have not followed the development of the open software movement. Watching webcasts from the Build event in Redmond it brought to my realization that the open source movement might actually be winning (yes with tiger blood dripping from its teeth). Some of the talks that gave me this feeling is The Future of C++ and It’s all about performance: Using Visual C++ 2012 to make the best use of your hardware. The first presentation talks about the renascence of C++ and mentions Microsofts commitment to the C++11 standard. It also mentions the site isocpp.org which is heavily funded by Mircrosoft. If MS is ready to support a portable language with an open standard without trying to invent their own conflicting standard something must be going right in the world. The second clip handles the new C++ AMP API which is only available on Visual Studio 2012 right now, but it is an open documented API the anyone can port.

Microsoft has even made it possible to use their new release of Team Foundation Server under Linux, here is a blog that shows how to set it up on an virtual machine running Ubuntu.

I think we are seeing more and more of the code that used to be hidden away. API's are pushed closer to the core functionality and more code is shared. Just a while back Facebook shared their internal bag of C++ hacks called folly. Google has always been big on the open source scene with their project hosting and the Summer of Code event and more companies are doing similar things.

If new developers manages not to be torn apart from all the choices that are available I think there is a bright future for those who choose the open source path.