McVoy Strikes Back

cranos writes "Fast on the heels of his previous article claiming the kernel is at risk of Bad Things over the BitKeeper fuss, Daniel Lyons has released a new article where Larry McVoy attacks the Open Source movement as non-innovative and dependent on the kindness of corporations. The following quote says it all: 'The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That's easy. It's way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it's true.'"

Comments

Re:Non-innovative?

[anothy]

And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.

i'm sure you do. and that's exactly the problem. i agree that OpenSSH was an improvement over the original in many ways, but that's not the point: incrementally improving on the original is not innovation. it's excellent software work, good architecture and design work, and OpenSSH is a prime example of good open source working well as a component of a development methodology. but it is not an example of innovation.

you (and the community) have better examples.