Autor(es) Alexandre Oliva

Macrotema Política / Filosofia

Horário 04 de Junho - sábado, 09:00/10:00, 41C

Descrição

Russel Crowe, playing John Nash in Ron Howards' motion picture ``A Beautiful Mind´´, claims that Adam Smith's theory that ``in competition, individual ambition serves the common good´´ is incomplete, and that ``the best result will come from everybody in the group doing what's best for himself, and the group´´. It occurred to me that Adam Smith's motto synthesizes pretty well what happens in the competition-driven proprietary software development market, whereas John Nash's adds the cooperation that is so common even among competitors in Free Software markets. Every commercial Free Software developer tries to obtain its edge by developing better software, thus contributing to the software pool that even its competitors will be able to build upon. I.e., every Free Software developer does what's best for himself, and the group, so the best outcome is achieved.

Currículos

Alexandre Oliva

Computing Engineer (1995) and Master in Computer Science (1998) degrees obtained at State University of Campinas. Free Software user since early '90s; developer and evangelist since mid-'90s, having been involved with such projects as Amanda, Kaffe, GNU Libtool, GNU Automake, GNU Autoconf, GNU Compiler Collection, GNU binutils, GNU libc, GNU debugger and a few random patches for Linux (the kernel). Contributor to the GNU Project since mid-90's. Compiler Engineer at Red Hat since 2000.