[ Thanks to Duncan Ellis
for this link. ]
“The NYT view has some gold. Competition is always good. And the
Linux backers have hold of an important truth, which is that
persuading a lot of smart people each to devote a small part of
their time to an effort can produce impressive results. They are
also right to think that opening up computer code to the eyes of
the whole programming community can be extremely productive.
Microsoft itself sees increasing virtue in this idea, and is
developing shared source to open up code to scrutiny while the
company keeps firm hold of the pen.“But the NYT misses in some ways. First, none of this is free.
Software is a complicated industrial product requiring continuing
re-creation and support, and money to support it must come from
somewhere. Linux programmers are not street people who sleep on
steam grates so as to indulge their passion. They are supported,
often handsomely, by universities and IT companies. Even this
support is not sufficient to keep Linux going, and hardware
companies, notably IBM, are now pouring billions into it. There is
nothing wrong with this; IBM has good competitive reasons in that
it wants to dish Sun and Microsoft. But the movement is not the
folk song army depicted in the NYT…”
Related Story:
NY Times: The New Challenge to Microsoft(Sep 18, 2002)