[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Perhaps it is less surprising that the proponent of
the argument turns out to be Eric Raymond, a consistent opponent of
the GPL. Raymond is not a Linux kernel developer, although he did
initiate an ultimately unsuccessful project to rewrite the kbuild
system for configuring Linux kernels, and was well known in the
late nineties both for his writings and his part in the creation of
the Open Source initiative (OSI). The thrust of Raymond’s argument
is that the success of the Linux kernel project was due to the
personal skills of Linus Torvalds.“He says “I don’t think the GPL is the principal reason for
Linux’s success. Rather, I believe it’s because in 1991 Linus was
the first person to find the right social architecture for
distributed software development,”. “The GPL helped, but I think
mainly as a sort of social signal rather than as a legal document
with teeth.”“”There has been a fair amount of economic analysis done in the
last 10 years,” he says. “A significant amount of it has been done
by, well, me. Which seems to demonstrate that open source is what
the economist call a more efficient mode of production use, a
superior mode of production. You get better investment, better
return out of the resources you invest by doing open source
development than closed source development.” This, and the larger
numbers of developers available to open source projects, will
persuade companies that open source is the route to take.”