Re: DevShed: Open-Source - On Why Not

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 09:38:57AM +0530, Raj Mathur wrote:
> Another one who doesn't understand the first thing about the
> rapidly-growing community and the philosophy behind free software.

In other words, he just doesn't "Get it" TM :-)

> Does Mr Beste really think that anyone cares that IBM hasn't released
> the source code for AIX when there are equally good or better products
> going around?  As for the software corporations going broke because
> their open source products will be ``pirated'' (haahaa!), no one
> is forcing anyone to start or continue a software corporation.
> To paraphrase, if you choose to stand on the street corner and sell
> air, and go out of business because air is free, identify the idiot
> in the picture :-)

The point is, IBM is not complaining that they're not making money off
of JFS by open sourcing it. They're just trading something that isn't
bringing them any revenue for some good will. So they're actually happy.
The problem is with open source advocates going all over the place and
saying - product foo should be open source, because that's so much better.

> Beste makes his points compellingly with enough data to back them up,
> but he (and many others) just don't understand the first thing about
> the free software movement.  Releasing the source to a software may
> never make money for a company, but who cares?

He's not talking about free software movement. He's talking about the
people who go and try to tell corporations which have invested money into
developing software to release it under open source. It's just a coincidence
that these advocates happen to belong to the free software movement :-)

	-Arun

PS: Linus Torvalds doesn't hold the view that everything in the world
should be automatically open sourced, but he uses GPL for other reasons.