Andreesssen: Why Open Source Will Boom - in 103 Words

An anonymous reader writes "You gotta love Marc Andreessen's 12 reasons why Open Source is set to boom: can anyone use fewer than 103 words and still adduce as many reasons as he does?"

Comments

Re:Hmm, I smell a slashdotting

[PainKilleR-CE]

At the same time there are millions of people around the world who are anti-Bush. They dislike Bush and think his politics, especially international politicies, suck. These people are not anti-American and certainly do not sympathise or support Al-Quaida.

There are certain people in the US for whom it is beneficial to lump those of us who are anti-Bush alongside the anti-Americans. You don't need to help them by doing it yourself, though.

People don't need to sympathize with or support Al-Qaeda, though, to be anti-American, and many people that are now anti-Bush were previously anti-American in other ways. Lumping them together in defense against arguments he never made is just a straw-man to avoid the real issue. Many of the arguments Bush made to go into Afghanistan and Iraq were made before him by Clinton to justify bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. All of the same justifications, all of the same outrage from foreign governments, but very different results because of the effectiveness of the very different approaches.

In any case, anti-American sentiment tends to be very different from anti-Bush sentiment, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the US government, but rather with the perception of American culture and the globalization of American business. Many foreign governments would just as readily support Microsoft if they were a corporation in their own country, and the idea that China, like any other socialist country, would prefer an outside capitalist-run corporation's products in their market over an internal government-developed version of open-sourced products is laughable. It's not even particularly anti-American in that case, it's simply anti-Capitalist.