Free software is about freedom, not price. I don't care too much if freedom is expensive, I'd like it anway, and as far as software is concerned if I have to write it myself I will do that.
However, I'll address your price issue here:
A lot of things look expensive when they are done
inefficiently. Centralised production of information that will be controlled by an owner
is very inefficient. The figure recently quoted
for GNU/Linux was $1 billion (or whatever) dollars developement
cost if done traditionally. The actual cost is small enough to be lost in the noise.
What we can learn from this is that the greater efficiency of decentralised "peer production" is only limited by our ability to self-organize volutarily in pursuit of a common goal.
Concerning the value of the worker, you might want to look at "New Oroville" -- our future life as drones in the company hive, or "completely self-contained company community" as its called by the former-Microsoft execs who are building it.
Err..... based on past experience I think ESR would try to convince the more gullible players
to invest their beans in his great new company. Who needs boring stuff like business plans when
the MIGHTY POWER of open-source will guarantee success!
Unemployment in the UK contract market is at 30%.
We are talking about people with serious "architect-level" experience, not just coders, who cannot find any work at all and have been looking for 6 months or more. It's not a question of rates, nearly all big projects are going to FTVs (Fast Track Visas). Technically what your company is doing may be illegal, since FTVs are only supposed to be used to fill specific skill shortages. Of course, one would have to be naive to believe that is how it works in practice. Don't worry though, you'll get to experience this too -- it will be coming to the permanent market in the next year or so!!
Personally I am getting out of contracting and doing something non-IT related. The government has done enough damage with IR35, but FTVs are the knockout punch. Basically I think the dot-com and telecom crashes have signalled the end of the initial 20 year growth period in IT.
We are now entering a consolidation phase
when software is a commodity like hardware that is manufactured
at low-cost in Asia.
The Al-quaeda member interrogated by
the Indian government claimed that they had
sabotaged Windows XP. Then Windows XP is found to have an obvious and major security hole. Coincidence?
I know Microsoft software is flaky, but this bug is surely too big even for Microsoft.
The context of the advertisement
is a major part of the strategy. It's not just
about the number of times someone looks at
the advert, but about them having the desired
emotional state. This has to be controlled if it
is to be effective. Overuse of the advertisement outside
the appropriate context will "immunise" people to it.
In the Barrett article he refers to work done in the UK by the Medical Research Council and Committee on the Safety of Medicines.
People living in the UK know that reports from government sponsored bodies of this type can be subject to extensive political interference and should generally be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
The interference by high-level politicians and civil-servants is why we have had an epidemic of BSE and vCJD which successive governments covered up for many years.
The UK managed to create a completely new incurable brain-destroying disease, whose mechanism was unknown to science and which could not be eliminated by autoclaving at extreme temperaturs. The same government told people it was safe to eat the meat of infected animals, while calling in the military to carry out mass culls of hundreds of thousands of cows with the soldiers in bio-safety suits. Right now there are disused airfields across the UK which have hangars full of thousands of sealed old-drums containing burnt cow-carcus ash which is still contaminated and nobody knows to dispose of. What are we going to do with it, fire it into space?
Basically, don't believe any medical research which comes from the UK government and don't eat any beef products from the UK (it's still dangerous).
On the vaccine issue specifically, the UK has a socialised system of medicine in which the government pushes for cost-effective treatments rather than effective treatments. i.e. If there is an overall cost-saving for a treatment as there is with MMR (1 single shot vs 3 separate shots at different times) then the pressure will be to use that, and if a few children die or get autism well that's just bad luck for them because the government does not pay compensation and you cannot sue them. I am not against vaccination, but you cannot even choose what vaccine you want, the government forces everyone to have the MMR vaccine.
Certainly most of the alternative-medicine people promoting chelation are frauds who don't know what they are doing. That does not mean that chelation is bad, per se. It would be a good reason for the average person not to undergo chelation unless they had undertaken extensive research for themselves.
Quackwatch always has its own agenda of helping people avoid quacks. They do some useful work in that regard but it is not science.
Note that I don't claim that the mercury theory is proven.
I believe it is plausible, and has a reasonable theoretical basis. That is more than can be said for some of the theories from psychiatrists etc.
Some people have reported good success, in line with what would be predicted. They did not go to quacks, they usually undertook it themselves (DMSA is relatively cheap and available without prescription). As the article notes many of the parents of these children are extremely smart and highly-qualified, so they have the ability to study the literature.
Note also that I wouldn't claim that all cases of autism are heavy-metal poisoning, only that most cases of heavy-metal poisoning would be diagnosed as autism in today's medical culture.
Note up until the 1940's the medical profession was for many years unable to explain the occurrence of acrodynia (aka "pink disease", which causes skin peeling) in babies. This was due to mercury poisioning from mercury in baby powders, but the medical profession rejected that idea for a long time because the doses involved were considered much too small to have any effect (which would be true in general, but not for those with a genetic susceptibility, probably catalase deficience in that case). After mercury was removed from baby powders the disease disappeared, and not many people have heard of it today.
You can calculate the mercury dose from thimerosal, based on the number and timing of vaccinations, and find that a small % of the population will be getting peak concentrations up near neurotoxic levels of 1 uM.
I think it's an interesting hypothesis and worth pursuing, since there are no bad side effects when chelation is done properly (not by quacks).
Yeah! Neurotoxic pollution is my bet too. I would put money on heavy metal poisioning in particular.
Note that susceptibility is genetically determined, e.g. via metallothionein or catalase impairment. So whether or not somebody gets brain damage is going to depend on the level and time-profile of exposure, including from the mother while in the womb too.
People in the valley are living in a ****ing toxic waste dump!
Might like to also ask why thimerosal, which is a mercury compound, is only now being banned from childhood vaccines. If you search the web you'll find plenty of people who say they have had success with heavy-metal chelation using DMSA+lipoic-acid as a treatment for autism. The standard heavy-metal poisioning chelation protocol of DMSA alone does not work (it does not cross the blood-brain barrier, whereas lipoic-acid does).
The more examples I see of this the more I've come to see that the open-source
development model is getting less and less credible as a way
to do large-scale projects.
Developing software using the proprietary model
may not always produce the greatest code, but there's no doubt
that it provides a good income
to thousands of developers with average skills that allows them to support their families.
What I saying is that companies have spent
a lot of money to do business online
but they've ended up opened their stores in
the seediest part of town with hookers and con-men hanging around their front-doors and hassling their customers.
It's bad business for major e-commerce companies
not to invest in an industry
consortium to get legislation to make spam illegal,
starting with sexually-explicit spam.
The whole industry is suffering from these spammers in my opinion, what we can see today is that the internet is not the good place to do business that it might have been -- the 'brand image' is severely tarnished and the longer it goes on the more difficult it is going to be to recover from that.
I don't need statistics to tell me that the level
of spam is going up, the number of messages I get from hot-n-horny teenage vixens wanting me to look at their webcam tells
me that. And this is to a unique business email address which is used on my business web-page only and has never been posted to usenet.
What surprises me is how the major players who stand to benefit from universal internet use
have ignored the threat of spam to the internet as
a whole.
To the ordinary user receiving a daily mailbox of sexually-explicit advertising
is a major turn-off. I know several ordinary people who just stopped using email because of this sort of thing, and just use their cellphones to make calls and leave voicemail instead. No telephone company would survive for a second if its voicemail customers got bombarded by the same sort of sexually-explicit advertising that internet users get by email.
Spam filtering is not a viable solution for average non-technical users. The industry needs to clean up its act or it will suffer major consequences.
If the present trends continue it would not surprise me if email actually drops out of mainstream existence and is only used by a geek subculture, being replaced by other messaging solutions that provide a safe environment.
A lot of what passes for commercial research is crap.
For example, the stomach-ulcer drug "Zantac" was one of the biggest-selling drugs
of all-time with billions of dollars in revenue. A perfect example of the commercial
research model.
Unfortunately the drug was complete crap, because
all it did was treat the symptoms of stomach ulcers and not the cause, so you had to take it forever while the ulcers would silently get worse, requiring increasing doses. Of course, this is a great revenue generator -- the drug seems to work in trials, because it relieves the pain but somehow those patients just need to keep coming back for more.
There was ONE guy in the world, a pathologist from New Zealand, who actually found out the real cause of many stomach ulcers -- a simple bacterial infection of the stomach that could be cured with cheap generic antibiotics. He spent twenty years trying to
get the medical community to listen to him, but was completely ignored! After all he couldn't be right because Zantac was so successful! Standard treatment for ulcers today is testing for the bacteria (H.Pylori) and antibiotics.
Commercial research maximises profits, not progress. People who make real breakthroughs won't be accepted in a commercial research model, because they don't conform to the norm -- after all if a researcher finds out that a billion-dollar drug is useless that is not going to look good for the university -- people have been killed for less. Any university which goes down that road is going to guarantee it ends up producing mediocre incremental advances. We don't need any more zantacs, we need smart people with intellectual freedom -- if we can't collectively afford that then we are doomed.
The FSF asks for copyright assignments because of the legal advice
that the best chance of the defending the
license is if it is held by a single well-funded organization.
If you've ever tried to sue someone infringing your copyright
then you've got to be aware that you are putting your
personal savings, house, etc on the line if the case goes down the pan and you have to pay legal costs, which could be huge. If you assign to the FSF
you eliminate your personal liability. The FSF has a legal warchest
ready for fighting any infringement of the GPL.
Basically if you don't assign to the FSF or someother big organization that you're in a really weak position and could lose a lot if you actually tried to enforce the license.
I agree that free software is a community effort, but open source was a business idea.
Imagine if artists started going to Wall Street and saying how community art companies could realise massive spin-off benefits through design consulting from providing free art to the community. The charismatic leader of the artists would be flying around the country speaking to local artists groups in evangelical type meetings saying things like "The art is free but people will pay for the design consulting!". The artists, who are mostly poor and unknown, love the idea that there work will be recognized, the press loves it for the novelty and because it makes a great story, playing it up at every opportunity, and in order to jump on the publicity bandwagon all the big companies start saying how they support community art, and redesignate their decorating budgets as "community art funding". To cap it all imagine that these artists actually got millions of dollars in funding for their hare-brained schemes in the hottest IPOs of all time, only to find 1 year later that their idea was wrong and they were all going bankrupt.
Most people would surely consider that to be an example of a mass delusion, which is exactly how most people see the idea of open source too.
Note that the company behind Postgresql went bankrupt, and the company behind apache is making a proprietary version of apache.
I don't deny that there are successful free software projects but they are still amateur efforts compared with commercial development. I don't want to demean amateur projects, but they are not in the same league as commercial work. There is a vast difference between some developers getting together on a mailing list in their spare time compared with hundreds or thousands of developers and ancilliary staff working full-time on commercial projects. The commercial projects not only produce software but organize the resources, providing pensions, health insurance, paid vacation etc. I can build a kit-car in my garage, and collaborate with other kit-car enthusiasts on the internet, but it doesn't mean I can compete with Ford, when they employ thousands of full-time professional engineers, salesmen, lawyers and even run their own international airline.
Amateur projects tend to be organised around a few people and very much depend on those people maintaining their interest in the project. That simply isn't a sufficiently solid foundation for a modern economy which needs to undertake hugely complex, long-term and capital-intensive projects.
Good grief, my original post was marked as a troll and my followup explaining why it wasn't is marked as a troll too.
People are so wrapped up in the open source myth that they cannot see the reality: practically every open source company is going or has gone bankrupt, those that are still surviving are will be beaten out of their markets by proprietary software companies in the long-run. There is a simple economic reason: proprietary software companies have an extra source of revenue from licenses which enables them to outcompete and outsurvive open source companies in the long-run. It's simple Darwinian evolution. I'm sorry to have to say it, but no matter how much I'd like open source companies to succeed, and I would, it's not going to happen.
As for writing free sofware as a volunteer effort, I have the greatest respect for the people who do that, it's a nice gift to the community. Volunteer work is important to our society, but let's not confuse it with business -- that would be like saying the local soup kitchen is going to put McDonald's out of business.
The dream is over guys. It's like when they Berlin wall came down and the Soviet union collapsed -- the old communist party leaders simply couldn't accept that the world had changed and all their power and status was gone forever, they probably still don't believe it but that's the way it is.
Ask yourself: Is capitalist censorship any better than communist
censorship?
Yes. Because it doesn't involve mass executions
and reeducation camps.
Am I being censored if I'm too lazy to get off my fat ass, stop watching TV and read a book, use the internet, or file a freedom of information act request? I don't think so...
These days the "first wave" of maintainers
are leaving their projects and I am seeing a
lot of good packages being driven into the ground
by the inexperienced and overenthusiastic people
who take over. The first rule of software
development is "if it ain't broke don't fix it"
but when a new maintainer take over the first
thing they want to do is rewrite everything.
The catch twenty-two of project maintenance is that anybody who has the
experience knows how much effort it requires and will be reluctant to volunteer, so the people who will actually step forward are those who are too inexperienced to know better.
Whoever marked my post as "troll" -- it's not.
I know nobody likes to hear the truth but that's
the way it is. We have all got to wake up now the bubble is over. Just talk to any ordinary person in the street
about the idea of running a business based
on giving software away for nothing. They will
think you are a total fruit-loop, as if you
said you were going to make money by selling
vacations on the Moon or by investing in
edible cardboard toys (It's the next big thing!)
Open Source was a mass delusion fueled by
the internet bubble. These types of mass hysteria are very common during economic booms. History will look back on
it as a form of collective geek madness. With the benefit of hindsight any objective person can see that open source makes
about as much sense as farmers giving away food
and trying to generate revenue by providing cookery
lessons. The whole open source meme plays on
the idea that geeks in their bedrooms want to believe they can out-code the big players
and produce better software. The real flaw in the whole thing
is that the strength big players is not (and does not need to be) in their coding, but in their ability
to organize and focus enormous human and financial resources on creating and deploying software technology sustained over the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more likely that any additional profits will go to shareholders.
However, I'll address your price issue here:
A lot of things look expensive when they are done inefficiently. Centralised production of information that will be controlled by an owner is very inefficient. The figure recently quoted for GNU/Linux was $1 billion (or whatever) dollars developement cost if done traditionally. The actual cost is small enough to be lost in the noise.
What we can learn from this is that the greater efficiency of decentralised "peer production" is only limited by our ability to self-organize volutarily in pursuit of a common goal.
Concerning the value of the worker, you might want to look at "New Oroville" -- our future life as drones in the company hive, or "completely self-contained company community" as its called by the former-Microsoft execs who are building it.
Expect to see more articles along the lines of "Google saved my life/company/favorite pet/etc"
As others have pointed out, after the IPO Google will become a subscription service.
Err..... based on past experience I think ESR would try to convince the more gullible players to invest their beans in his great new company. Who needs boring stuff like business plans when the MIGHTY POWER of open-source will guarantee success!
Unemployment in the UK contract market is at 30%. We are talking about people with serious "architect-level" experience, not just coders, who cannot find any work at all and have been looking for 6 months or more. It's not a question of rates, nearly all big projects are going to FTVs (Fast Track Visas). Technically what your company is doing may be illegal, since FTVs are only supposed to be used to fill specific skill shortages. Of course, one would have to be naive to believe that is how it works in practice. Don't worry though, you'll get to experience this too -- it will be coming to the permanent market in the next year or so!! Personally I am getting out of contracting and doing something non-IT related. The government has done enough damage with IR35, but FTVs are the knockout punch. Basically I think the dot-com and telecom crashes have signalled the end of the initial 20 year growth period in IT. We are now entering a consolidation phase when software is a commodity like hardware that is manufactured at low-cost in Asia.
I know Microsoft software is flaky, but this bug is surely too big even for Microsoft.
The context of the advertisement is a major part of the strategy. It's not just about the number of times someone looks at the advert, but about them having the desired emotional state. This has to be controlled if it is to be effective. Overuse of the advertisement outside the appropriate context will "immunise" people to it.
In the Barrett article he refers to work done in the UK by the Medical Research Council and Committee on the Safety of Medicines.
People living in the UK know that reports from government sponsored bodies of this type can be subject to extensive political interference and should generally be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
The interference by high-level politicians and civil-servants is why we have had an epidemic of BSE and vCJD which successive governments covered up for many years.
The UK managed to create a completely new incurable brain-destroying disease, whose mechanism was unknown to science and which could not be eliminated by autoclaving at extreme temperaturs. The same government told people it was safe to eat the meat of infected animals, while calling in the military to carry out mass culls of hundreds of thousands of cows with the soldiers in bio-safety suits. Right now there are disused airfields across the UK which have hangars full of thousands of sealed old-drums containing burnt cow-carcus ash which is still contaminated and nobody knows to dispose of. What are we going to do with it, fire it into space?
Basically, don't believe any medical research which comes from the UK government and don't eat any beef products from the UK (it's still dangerous).
On the vaccine issue specifically, the UK has a socialised system of medicine in which the government pushes for cost-effective treatments rather than effective treatments. i.e. If there is an overall cost-saving for a treatment as there is with MMR (1 single shot vs 3 separate shots at different times) then the pressure will be to use that, and if a few children die or get autism well that's just bad luck for them because the government does not pay compensation and you cannot sue them. I am not against vaccination, but you cannot even choose what vaccine you want, the government forces everyone to have the MMR vaccine.
Quackwatch always has its own agenda of helping people avoid quacks. They do some useful work in that regard but it is not science.
Note that I don't claim that the mercury theory is proven.
I believe it is plausible, and has a reasonable theoretical basis. That is more than can be said for some of the theories from psychiatrists etc.
Some people have reported good success, in line with what would be predicted. They did not go to quacks, they usually undertook it themselves (DMSA is relatively cheap and available without prescription). As the article notes many of the parents of these children are extremely smart and highly-qualified, so they have the ability to study the literature.
Note also that I wouldn't claim that all cases of autism are heavy-metal poisoning, only that most cases of heavy-metal poisoning would be diagnosed as autism in today's medical culture. Note up until the 1940's the medical profession was for many years unable to explain the occurrence of acrodynia (aka "pink disease", which causes skin peeling) in babies. This was due to mercury poisioning from mercury in baby powders, but the medical profession rejected that idea for a long time because the doses involved were considered much too small to have any effect (which would be true in general, but not for those with a genetic susceptibility, probably catalase deficience in that case). After mercury was removed from baby powders the disease disappeared, and not many people have heard of it today.
You can calculate the mercury dose from thimerosal, based on the number and timing of vaccinations, and find that a small % of the population will be getting peak concentrations up near neurotoxic levels of 1 uM.
I think it's an interesting hypothesis and worth pursuing, since there are no bad side effects when chelation is done properly (not by quacks).
the second link should have been http://www.autism-mercury.com/
I agree on the cell-phones. I don't use them.
Yeah! Neurotoxic pollution is my bet too. I would put money on heavy metal poisioning in particular. Note that susceptibility is genetically determined, e.g. via metallothionein or catalase impairment. So whether or not somebody gets brain damage is going to depend on the level and time-profile of exposure, including from the mother while in the womb too.
See e.g. here or here or here
People in the valley are living in a ****ing toxic waste dump!
Might like to also ask why thimerosal, which is a mercury compound, is only now being banned from childhood vaccines. If you search the web you'll find plenty of people who say they have had success with heavy-metal chelation using DMSA+lipoic-acid as a treatment for autism. The standard heavy-metal poisioning chelation protocol of DMSA alone does not work (it does not cross the blood-brain barrier, whereas lipoic-acid does).
The more examples I see of this the more I've come to see that the open-source development model is getting less and less credible as a way to do large-scale projects.
Developing software using the proprietary model may not always produce the greatest code, but there's no doubt that it provides a good income to thousands of developers with average skills that allows them to support their families.
It's bad business for major e-commerce companies not to invest in an industry consortium to get legislation to make spam illegal, starting with sexually-explicit spam.
The whole industry is suffering from these spammers in my opinion, what we can see today is that the internet is not the good place to do business that it might have been -- the 'brand image' is severely tarnished and the longer it goes on the more difficult it is going to be to recover from that.
What surprises me is how the major players who stand to benefit from universal internet use have ignored the threat of spam to the internet as a whole.
To the ordinary user receiving a daily mailbox of sexually-explicit advertising is a major turn-off. I know several ordinary people who just stopped using email because of this sort of thing, and just use their cellphones to make calls and leave voicemail instead. No telephone company would survive for a second if its voicemail customers got bombarded by the same sort of sexually-explicit advertising that internet users get by email.
Spam filtering is not a viable solution for average non-technical users. The industry needs to clean up its act or it will suffer major consequences.
If the present trends continue it would not surprise me if email actually drops out of mainstream existence and is only used by a geek subculture, being replaced by other messaging solutions that provide a safe environment.
Commercial research maximises profits, not progress. People who make real breakthroughs won't be accepted in a commercial research model, because they don't conform to the norm -- after all if a researcher finds out that a billion-dollar drug is useless that is not going to look good for the university -- people have been killed for less. Any university which goes down that road is going to guarantee it ends up producing mediocre incremental advances. We don't need any more zantacs, we need smart people with intellectual freedom -- if we can't collectively afford that then we are doomed.
The FSF asks for copyright assignments because of the legal advice that the best chance of the defending the license is if it is held by a single well-funded organization. If you've ever tried to sue someone infringing your copyright then you've got to be aware that you are putting your personal savings, house, etc on the line if the case goes down the pan and you have to pay legal costs, which could be huge. If you assign to the FSF you eliminate your personal liability. The FSF has a legal warchest ready for fighting any infringement of the GPL. Basically if you don't assign to the FSF or someother big organization that you're in a really weak position and could lose a lot if you actually tried to enforce the license.
Unless you were in Japan in the 1980's, right?
Imagine if artists started going to Wall Street and saying how community art companies could realise massive spin-off benefits through design consulting from providing free art to the community. The charismatic leader of the artists would be flying around the country speaking to local artists groups in evangelical type meetings saying things like "The art is free but people will pay for the design consulting!". The artists, who are mostly poor and unknown, love the idea that there work will be recognized, the press loves it for the novelty and because it makes a great story, playing it up at every opportunity, and in order to jump on the publicity bandwagon all the big companies start saying how they support community art, and redesignate their decorating budgets as "community art funding". To cap it all imagine that these artists actually got millions of dollars in funding for their hare-brained schemes in the hottest IPOs of all time, only to find 1 year later that their idea was wrong and they were all going bankrupt.
Most people would surely consider that to be an example of a mass delusion, which is exactly how most people see the idea of open source too.
Note that the company behind Postgresql went bankrupt, and the company behind apache is making a proprietary version of apache.
I don't deny that there are successful free software projects but they are still amateur efforts compared with commercial development. I don't want to demean amateur projects, but they are not in the same league as commercial work. There is a vast difference between some developers getting together on a mailing list in their spare time compared with hundreds or thousands of developers and ancilliary staff working full-time on commercial projects. The commercial projects not only produce software but organize the resources, providing pensions, health insurance, paid vacation etc. I can build a kit-car in my garage, and collaborate with other kit-car enthusiasts on the internet, but it doesn't mean I can compete with Ford, when they employ thousands of full-time professional engineers, salesmen, lawyers and even run their own international airline.
Amateur projects tend to be organised around a few people and very much depend on those people maintaining their interest in the project. That simply isn't a sufficiently solid foundation for a modern economy which needs to undertake hugely complex, long-term and capital-intensive projects.
People are so wrapped up in the open source myth that they cannot see the reality: practically every open source company is going or has gone bankrupt, those that are still surviving are will be beaten out of their markets by proprietary software companies in the long-run. There is a simple economic reason: proprietary software companies have an extra source of revenue from licenses which enables them to outcompete and outsurvive open source companies in the long-run. It's simple Darwinian evolution. I'm sorry to have to say it, but no matter how much I'd like open source companies to succeed, and I would, it's not going to happen. As for writing free sofware as a volunteer effort, I have the greatest respect for the people who do that, it's a nice gift to the community. Volunteer work is important to our society, but let's not confuse it with business -- that would be like saying the local soup kitchen is going to put McDonald's out of business.
The dream is over guys. It's like when they Berlin wall came down and the Soviet union collapsed -- the old communist party leaders simply couldn't accept that the world had changed and all their power and status was gone forever, they probably still don't believe it but that's the way it is.
Yes. Because it doesn't involve mass executions and reeducation camps. Am I being censored if I'm too lazy to get off my fat ass, stop watching TV and read a book, use the internet, or file a freedom of information act request? I don't think so...
The catch twenty-two of project maintenance is that anybody who has the experience knows how much effort it requires and will be reluctant to volunteer, so the people who will actually step forward are those who are too inexperienced to know better.
Whoever marked my post as "troll" -- it's not. I know nobody likes to hear the truth but that's the way it is. We have all got to wake up now the bubble is over. Just talk to any ordinary person in the street about the idea of running a business based on giving software away for nothing. They will think you are a total fruit-loop, as if you said you were going to make money by selling vacations on the Moon or by investing in edible cardboard toys (It's the next big thing!)
Open Source was a mass delusion fueled by the internet bubble. These types of mass hysteria are very common during economic booms. History will look back on it as a form of collective geek madness. With the benefit of hindsight any objective person can see that open source makes about as much sense as farmers giving away food and trying to generate revenue by providing cookery lessons. The whole open source meme plays on the idea that geeks in their bedrooms want to believe they can out-code the big players and produce better software. The real flaw in the whole thing is that the strength big players is not (and does not need to be) in their coding, but in their ability to organize and focus enormous human and financial resources on creating and deploying software technology sustained over the long term.