[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“An enthusiastic programmer may truthfully see his code as art,
but most people outside the field will not agree: programs are a
tool, like a hammer; a word processor is just the digital
equivalent of a typewriter, and no-one would say typewriters should
be free. If the commercial world embraces open-source software,
it is only because of long-term financial gains….“
“The argument that software is an art rings a note only in
programmers. The Real World sees applications as nothing more than
tools, utilities.”
“I suggest a double-faced approach in the community: to the
“suits”, show a commercialist, pragmatic face (“Open-source”,
massive debugging, harnessing of a great talent pool and so forth);
but the community itself should remember that the success of Linux
is guaranteed only by the GNU GPL. For the copyleft license
warrants that no commercial body shall fork the program to their
own selfish gain, but rather the program shall forever stay in the
hands of the community. As Red Hat shows, it is perfectly possible
to make a fortune even out of GPL’ed software.”