“The OpenSource movement is one of those things I both love and
hate. I love the concept – it harkens back to the 70s and how I got
into computing. It was a time when almost no one actually owned a
computer; we shared access to systems which ran Unix and MTS and
other esoteric OSes, or we borrowed time on PDP-8s, and PDP-11s
when the University would let us have it. We didn’t compete about
brand of computer – who could afford our own computer? – we engaged
in friendly competition trying to improve each other’s code.”
“That all changed in the late 70’s when a young programmer
actually had the audacity to sell his BASIC interpreter to the
other programmers rather than just giving it and the source code
for it away. He went away and sold it to Altair and Apple and
well… the rest, as they say, is history. With the IBM-PC making
microcomputing respectable in 1981 (running an OS owned by,
although not written by, that same young programmer), the die was
cast and computing was changed in a fundamental way. Creating
software, even for recreational purposes, was tied to making money
– and nothing kills the notion of community faster than putting a
price on it.”
“Some people, like Richard Stallman, have always tried to keep a
bit of this spirit alive – admittedly, it must be like fighting
uphill in an avalanche. But it wasn’t until Linux that the
OpenSource movement really kicked in. Sure, there were lots of
other OpenSource projects before Linux – BSD, GNU, and while Linux
relies on GNU for a lot of its tools, the truth is that none of
these projects ever managed to capture the heart of people like
Linux.”
“Which leads me to the ‘hate’ part. There’s a growing
fanaticism within the OpenSource community which is starting to
smell almost as bad as the fanaticism it tries to combat.“