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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, if robotics are taking care of mass production with very little human input, 3d printing and other emergent home technologies will create an explosion in artisan production.

We're about to see a shift in the material world similar to the way the open source world changed software.

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I don't see how "open source" had all that big of an impact on software.

IMO, "open source" software fills the same roll as government spending on infrastructure. Basically, contributing a small amount of energy for a share of a public good has a net positive result. But, little changes from the perspective of a user or a developer.

"Little changes" from the perspective of a developer? I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.

If I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I am), a plurality (if not an outright majority) of web servers are run using an open source OS. jQuery/Prototype/MooTools together hold an obscenely high share of the JavaScript library market. The great majority of websites on the internet run some combination of PHP, Python, Ruby, many of those running open-source frameworks like Pylons, RoR, CodeIgniter, Kohana, web2py, Django, etc. A great number of developers code using Vim, Eclipse, or some other open source text editor.

And from the perspective of the user? It's hard to quantify this just by saying "Firefox" or "Chrome" or the "V8 JavaScript Engine". I think open source projects (like jQuery) benefit hugely from crowd sourcing their problems. By making their bug reports and code public, they allow someone like me to fork the project on GitHub, fix the bugs, and issue a pull request back to the master branch. They're basically fine-tuning their product without doing nearly as much work as closed-source shops without paying the person for fixing the problem. To the user, it looks like things get done quickly and bugs tend to come far less often (if the crowd sourcing is done right).

In my humble estimation, these are rather important considerations when judging the success of open source...and these are only web technologies.

After many years of software development I have briefly used Eclipse which sucked (IMO) and VIM which was slightly better than good old vanilla VI and nothing else on your list. (Note: as a developer.) Granted, I don't do a lot of web development but my point is just because there are some popular tools for your nitch does not mean there has been a fundamental shift in software.

Open source is way bigger than that. But, if you didn't like Eclipse or vim. What did you like?

BBedit was more useful for me than vim (at the time).

Recently I find Visual Studio is a nice IDE and last time I compared them Eclipse was clearly worse (it's been a few years). However, I have used a wide range of things from early versions of Borland Pascal and various things I can't even recall on old versions of Mac OS etc.

More or less the entire web?

Plenty of people use open source software, but when it comes to writing drivers for the next generation of GPU or the Ignition Timing software for the 2012 Honda civic the Open Source revolution has more or less fallen flat.

Are you sure that either of those aren't compiled or linked using GNU tools?

Are you sure being GNU matters for such users?

Sure, in that if GNU tools didn't exist, some software would not exist, and others would be prohibitively expensive.

GNU has impacted users lives.

You could get fairly high quality IDE's at low cost ex:Borland Pascal long before GNU became an issue.

Before GNU Linux, only corporation had access to Unix systems like HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, etc.

The history of UNIX was a little more complex than that. The average consumer could not afford a ex: a PDP-11 but there where relatively low cost systems available around the same time as GNU Linux showed up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.png

PS: Ok, I get that people feel the need to down vote when they have an emotional reaction, but how was that anything but a truthful statement?

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