“If you followed the meteoric rise of Linux over the last few
months, you’ll have become accustomed to the cry of “World
Domination!” and to the intense hatred of all things
Microsoft.”
“The Free Software Foundation (FSF), authors of the GNU General
Public Licence (GPL), claim to be the custodians of an ancient (in
computer terms) hacker tradition, of sharing code for the good of
all. A fine socialist agenda. But, if you really look at the
origins of open source software, you’ll find that Richard M.
Stallman’s claim to be the last of the old hackers is really not
true. He was the socialist who was able to find other ways of
paying for his food, and the majority of the ‘real hackers’ took
jobs and went to work like everyone else.”
“If you believe Stallman and Eric S. Raymond, then you’ll think
that the rise of open source software is owing to the better
development model, allowing more people to debug the code and to
‘scratch their itch’. While this certainly is a factor in most open
source projects, a great deal of open source development has been
funded by government grants, large corporations and research
projects.”