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What's Wrong with the Open Source Community?
An anonymous reader writes "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us says a Pogo-quoting James Turner, in trying to pinpoint "What's Wrong with the Open Source Community?" for LinuxWorld this morning. But he doesn't *just* say that it's we developers ourselves, he also has five hard-to-deny reasons, including 'Open source developers often scratch the same itch' and 'Open Source developers love a good feud.' He also suggests we often approach the whole issue of encouraging migration to Linux from Windows entirely wrongly." There's also a decent rebuttal with this story as well - worth reading.
I write free software for a living, and I'm getting paid. I'm writing an application for a vertical market (i.e. a market with very few customers). They pay me to provide the functionality they need, and they don't care about the license.
In the other end, the horizontal market, people are getting paid as well. The Linux kernel, Mozilla, and Open Office are primarily developed by people getting paid to do so.
And in-between these two extremes, people are getting paid as well. Samba, Apache, GCC, GDB and other popular network and development applications are primarily being developed by people getting paid to do so.
It is true that most free software applications, if you count them on sourceforge, are developed by amateurs in their spare time. But most of these applications have very few users as well.
Most of the free software most people use are developed by people getting paid to do so.