Keith Curtis worked at Microsoft for 11 years, coding on Windows, Office, and at Microsoft's research department, before leaving the Redmond giant. Call it a revelation, call it giving in to the devil's temptations, but he's now a complete open source and Linux advocate, and in his new book, "After the Software Wars", he explains why open source will prevail against Microsoft's proprietary model.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually Open Source is communism , you participate in a community for the greater good of the project , your share and improve the same code as Open Source is a method of development and nothing more. Beside what your describing is dictatorship or Stalinism.
But then Open Source is not the subject here , it's Free Software , witch is as close as possible to pure democracy as can be. You don't like how a project is going you can take it in another direction and openly discuss it's flaws and problems.
Edited 2009-05-22 17:40 UTC
Member since:2007-09-06
So, the developers are forced to join assigned projects or are they free to choose where they spend there free time? Where the told "this will be GPL or you will be shot." Can they not choose any of the umpteen other non-viral FOSS licenses like MIT or Apache? Can a project not be freely forked if a developer wants to go a different way with it?
Do various similar projects not compete based on the merits of quality and functionality allowing the end user to choose what the best fit?
On the other side of the coin, you have wage slaves who's efforts are the proprietary possesion of the employing company. Same as the music industry, the artist does not own there own work; the media company does.
Member since:2005-07-06
You're making a pretty big leap of faith that those who contribute to open source projects are motivated by altruistic visions. The vast majority of programmers are propelled to contribute by something that both Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman both talked about: rational self interest (or to use Objectivist lingo, 'Selfishness').
Their rational self interest takes the form in wanting to scratch an itch, fix something up that they want fixed - what ever the case maybe, no one is ever compelled to do something through the goodness of their own heart, they are gaining something out of contributing whether it be objective (a working piece of software) or a subjective (he or she feels good after fixing it up for someone else).
I wouldn't call it a democracy because democracy is where the minority is subjected to the tyranny of the majority; the closest political parallel would be anarchy; where people create voluntary relationships that are propelled by their rational self interest and when the relationship no longer fulfils what they want they can leave and do as they wish.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Ummm, how is it communist given that all those who participate freely do so? there is no compulsion to give, there is no compulsion to use, there is no compulsion that you must be part of that community and thus allow you to create a fork. I think you need to lay off the right wing shock-jocks for a while because opensource is anything but communist.