[snip]
> Finally Matthias Ettrich gave his talk on OpenSource software. I
> personally liked the speach very much. Matthias analyzed the success and
> failures of OpenSource Software projects like Mozilla and the GIMP. 

To avoid any missunderstandings: I talked mainly about Open Source philosophies
and why Mozilla, though everything looked just great according to this theories,
failed as open source project. For further analysis, I compard it with KDE
(naturally, since that's the project I'm most familiar with) and other
successful efforts like Linux itself, Apache and, most certainly, the GIMP.

The purpose wasn't to show failures in the Mozilla project, but failures in the
Open Source (and GNU) theories as far as they ignore the self determined
software developer who actually writes the code, and his specific personal
interests.

For me this was just a short trip in non-coding areas of free software
development. I felt the need to bring a pure developer's point of view in the
discussion to give users of open source software a better insight about its
development model and its developers.

The LinuxTag as Germany's largest meeting of Linux users (~7000, to be
precise) offered a good opportunity to do this :)


Matthias