“When I read the other day an article entitled ‘Why Open Source
May Be Doomed,’ my first reaction was to just ignore it. It’s hard
to rationally answer an article so biased, factually inaccurate,
and lacking in fundamental comprehension of the subject as this
one, which begins like this:“‘I have to admit that I was never much of a believer in
open source. Maybe my business school coursework rendered me blind
to the glorious vision of a ‘gift culture’ in which people
contribute their work to a decentralized development project like
Linux for honor instead of money. Or possibly I’m just too thick to
understand how cutting off a multi-billion dollar revenue stream
from software sales, without putting anything else in its place,
could be good for the software business. Whatever the problem, I
never quite believed in the fairy tale world they promised in which
we’d all get an operating system that was better than Windows in
every way, for absolutely no money — not even when IBM started
retailing Linux PC’s and the juggernaut of fabulous free operating
systems seemed unstoppable. But I confess that in all my skeptical
musings, I did not imagine that Linux might be brought down by
something even more prosaic than a lack of funds: a
lawsuit.’“‘Too thick’ it is, then. You yourself said it…”
Related Story:
TechCentralStation:
Why Open Source May Be Doomed(Oct 06, 2003)