[ Thanks to Matt Asay
for this link. ]
I spent some time today reading Plato’s classic, The Republic
and, in particular, his famous Allegory of the Cave. I have many
good friends who work for proprietary software companies, and I’m
always puzzled by their inability to see how open source could
benefit them. They persist in believing that maximum money derives
from maximum control over their software and, hence, maximum
control over their customers.“This strange insistence on seeing the world through proprietary
glasses perplexes me as the software world moves online and
companies like Google show that you can make huge mountains of cash
by giving your core service away for free. Infatuated as they are
with bits and bytes, they have completely missed the movement of
software away from software, per se, to service…”