| 13 | | One concern I see from more reflection is that even if only 1% of WordPress Trac users have JavaScript turned off like via NoScript (a guess, but we don't know for sure without quantified measurements), such techies may be a disproportionately higher percentage of Trac reporters than just 1%. For example, as [http://leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/index.html Melinda Varian documents], when IBM announced on the February 8, 1983 it would go "Object Code Only (OCO)" with its mainframe VM (virtual machine) source code instead of keeping the previous policy of having the source code accessible to all licensed users, who could share changes with other licensed users, forming the basis of a thriving community. The justification was in part that only a small percentage of the sites actually used the source code so access was not very important. I expect some lawyer or executive somewhere thought the benefits of preventing competitors gaining access to "secrets" would outweigh a very few unhappy users. Of course, those small number of sites that used the source code (Melinda Varian's Princeton University site was one of them) were the places that were continually fixing IBM's many bugs and providing various enhancements for free. That move has now been widely seen to have been a disaster for IBM as well as the VM community. IBM's move to supporting open source software in the 2000s was in part a reflection of that past experience as some long-time IBMers were still upset about that whole OCO decision (although obviously, industry trends with Linux played a part, too). |
| | 13 | One concern I see from more reflection is that even if only 1% of WordPress Trac users have JavaScript turned off like via NoScript (a guess, but we don't know for sure without quantified measurements), such techies may be a disproportionately higher percentage of Trac reporters than just 1%. Consider for example, as [http://leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/index.html Melinda Varian documents], what happened when IBM announced on February 8, 1983 that it would go "Object Code Only (OCO)" with its mainframe VM (virtual machine) source code instead of keeping the previous policy of having the source code accessible to all licensed users. Those users (essentially anyone using an IBM mainframe), could share changes with other licensed users, forming the basis of a thriving community. The justification for OCO was in part that only a small percentage of the sites actually used the source code so access was not very important. I expect some lawyer or executive somewhere thought the benefits of preventing competitors gaining access to "secrets" would outweigh a very few unhappy users. Of course, those small number of sites that used the source code (Melinda Varian's Princeton University site was one of them) were the places that were continually fixing IBM's many bugs and providing various enhancements for free. That move has now been widely seen to have been a disaster for IBM as well as the VM community. IBM's move to supporting open source software in the 2000s was in part a reflection of that past experience as some long-time IBMers were still upset about that whole OCO decision (although obviously, industry trends with Linux played a part, too). |