Slashdot Mirror
Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
The artists moved to the Mac in 1984 for the user interface to make their art. They generated applications, hypercard stacks,applescripts, performance spaces like the apple store soho would eventually become, text and picture clippings, art galleries (tekserve).etc., due to their highly developed aesthetics.
these artists-- these creative designers, musicians, scientists, and programmers-- stayed on the Mac during the interregnum when apple was a decaying mess and, respecting the Gestalt manager, built their applications out of dilapidated but beautiful Toolbox code.
The pencil-pushers and accountning brats saw all of this and said, "Hey, that looks cool." "Daddy buy me some of that." But these switcheurs have nothing to contribute except a talent for demanding crap like glossy screens. just what the fuck are you spreadsheet fiddlers doing? nothing beyond fueling the demand for ugly, tragically misdesigned, cookie-cutter applications like Firefox and Azureus. That is why the Mac community has so rapidly gone into its Rococco stage.
The Mac community continues to change and it is becoming very clear that we are loosing our edge-- the subcultures that once thrived on the Mac are all loosing steam to the mainstream. art, music, nightlife, web development. The Mac is so over. very sad indeed.
mailto:acaben@macslash.org