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Open Source Advocates' Attitudes Toward Profit
jfruh writes "Marten Mickos, ex-head of MySQL, was discussing his new open source cloud initiative with the New York Times when he mentioned in passing that 'Some people in open source think it is immoral to make a profit. I don't.' This has set off some predictable hand-wringing within the movement. While some community members are ideologically opposed to profit-making, that attitude isn't held by a majority, or even a plurality."
It seems there's really three different situations we're talking about here, not two as the summary suggests:
The majority of major open source projects are one of the top two options, but I'd venture to guess the majority of open source projects in general are the later.
In any case, I wouldn't want to confuse the last two options in the list as they each have a different place in the open source ecosystem.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Might be a bad example, Mother Theresa was a strong opponent of women's rights. Lots of people, particularly women, had good reason to dislike her.
Mother Theresa [...] a saint
NOT!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
All,
This is a great discussion! I am glad to be back on /.
As often with press, I was not quoted verbatim. I stated my observation that in the world of free and open source software (FOSS), you find some people (some very few people, to be precise) who are judgmental about how other people perceive or act on open source. So when you have a certain governance model, business model, or development model, there will typically be some people who will loudly rule it out as wrong or improper or something. But I didn't say that I have anything against that, and I don't.
It's one of the strengths of the FOSS world. Differences in view are aired publicly, and many times (although not always) a higher level of understanding, or a new thinking will emerge.
We need to keep these discussions going, because as the world moves into the cloud, those same principles of openness that were developed for software code will have to somehow be applied on APIs and on data too.
Marten
There were a large number of women in India who didn't think Mother Theresa was any kind of humanitarian at all. Saint, being a religious term, she may be by decree. This doesn't mean she was kind to those who disagreed with her religious doctrines.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Growl is still open source, you can find it over at https://code.google.com/p/growl/ and build the source code using the instructions at http://growl.info/documentation/developer/growl-source-install.php. The source tracks the official releases from the developers and is still BSD licensed.
If you don't want to build from source, they do offer a pre-built binary for free, or maybe you can convince a developer friend to build it for you.
Either way, there is no bait-and-switch. The source has always been free. They just decided recently to start charging for the process of building and verifying binaries.
Influential? In what? She did nothing but support the status quo.
"Well-known" != "Influential".
Dilbert RSS feed
any of a number of things the lady started bringing to the poorest of the poor when no-one else would
Like what? Hoarding gifts and financial aid? Sick, delusional fascination with suffering misconstrued as care ("I think it is very good when people suffer. To me, that is like the kiss of Jesus.")? Go fuck yourself and take your catholic "saints" with you.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
He was born and raised in Finland, which was not a "socialist" country. It was mostly Social Democrats for a long time which are not at all the same thing as "socialist".
she did something
Yeah, she denied the poor wretches proper medical care and pain medication she was in power to provide.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
She also thought it was ok for Rich, famous people to divorce, but not the poor.
Horrible, Horrible human being.