Blog: Pete Loshin

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Open Source and Best Tech Products of All Time?

When PC World reported on The 50 Best Tech Products of All Time, Slashdot counted Apple holds down seven places in the list, Microsoft two, and open source software (Red Hat Linux) one.

That sounded strange to me, so I took a look at the list myself. Lots of old and new hardware, but also more open source than you'd imagine based on Slashdot's report:

Number 1, Netscape Navigator, was open-sourced in 1998, (see Netscape Communicator Open Source Code White Paper), but from the start Netscape's success was based on their use of an open standard protocol for web commerce.

Number 3, Tivo, is another open source success story, based on GNU/Linux.

Then, there's Number 20, Microsoft Windows 95. Yes, Windows 95 incorporated a bunch of open source code from BSD in order to provide TCP/IP support.

You could say that Number 30, Mac OSX, is an Apple product, but to be fair, you should at least acknowledge the debt Apple owes to open source projects including but not limited to OpenBSD and X Windows.

And finally, while shareware is not the same as open source, it is certainly a related category into which Eudora (Number 32) and PC-Talk (Number 47) both fit.

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