“One of the most persistent criticisms of open source is that it
is not innovative, but is simply a re-working of other people’s
ideas. Here’s a famous statement of that view by Microsoft’s Jim
Allchin from the first Halloween Document“When describing this problem to JimAll, he provided the perfect
analogy of ‘chasing tail lights’. The easiest way to get
coordinated behavior from a large, semi-organized mob is to point
them at a known target. Having the taillights provides concreteness
to a fuzzy vision. In such situations, having a taillight to follow
is a proxy for having strong central leadership.“That was back in 1998, but things weren’t much better in 2006,
when The Economist wrote a long feature about open source and its
‘limitations’:”
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