Open Source in 07 and other tech thoughts

So of course with various OSS news being tossed about I thought it a good time to editorialize some of my thoughts on the subject. First up, Red Hat and its future. While i don't think the recent actions by CentOS or Oracle are going to immediately impact the US leader in commercial distributions I do believe they will shape how Red Hat spins their services and how their distro develops.

GPL v3 concerns is next on my list. As the OSS community grows larger I realize that it's harder and harder to get everyone to agree on anything. the GPL changes proposed by Stallman et al are a textbook example of this. While I agree in the intension of the GPL license I am also slightly reserved about early adoption of the v3 GPL license. While the restrictions are meant to protect the coder and in theory keep it firmly away from IP violations, I do wonder if the restrictions are going to turn off some fledgling programmers.

Ongoing security debate. This one galls me often, simply because I don't subscribe to the notion that any computer system is necessarily more secure because it simply "is". Every OS can have flaws, if only because of the fact that both are created by humans and invariably will have defects. No amount of code auditing in the world is going to create 'perfect' code, in the end it depends on how the vendor/system administrator is able to deal with the issue.

So in a nutshell, potential movement in the OSS world, slow growth, and let's get off the security-bashing trend.