Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Community's Double Standard
AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"
It's because FOSSies are hypocrites.
A majority of Slashdotters not only are not programmers, or ever will be programmers, but they also never have any intention of being programmers. It kind of makes one wonder why they are so obsessed with source code when they have never looked at a single line of code... but that's because they are more interested in the "free".
The problem with "free" is that such people are crafting the GPL, which grows progressively more and more hostile to commercial interests, as well as to businesses who would be interested in using FOSS. Your average FOSSie not only has no experience in a large enterprise environment, but they resent such interests having any influence over FOSS.
Teh Lunis has criticized GPLv3... and he is the FOSSie God. If teh Lunis can't change their minds... it's pretty obvious the cause is lost. FOSS is dying from thousands of self-inflicted wounds. When they started letting non-technical people make decisions for them, FOSS was dead.
But look on the bright side: there will soon be a thriving community of MS-OSS, which embraces the enterprise, commercial interests, and businesses. And even better, it will be covered by Microsoft's excellent support structure.
Yeah, but if you make the source open, and charge for it, and restrict (through the software license) the user from redistributing or modifying, Bruce Perens will bitch that that's not really "open source software". If you explain that "open source" simply means "the source is open", he will claim you're an astroturfing corporate shill.
That's where I'm confused, I guess.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.