12:41:17 AM
"Where do you want to go today, Aiden?". - ...........There's been a lot of response to this open letter (including over 1000 comments on a Slashdot discussion), and Vasters has written a response to that response. The interesting part:
I think a company like Red Hat, which is a public company (which did yield a significant "going public benefit" to their founders) and is profiting from the work of countless unpaid volunteers and enthusiasts, is a very clever, but deeply unethical entity.
I do believe in giving and I do believe that there is value for the community at large in sharing insight through source code. But we don't share the view that software is free or should be free. Someone pays for it. We have an investment in software that is free for others to use, MySQL has, HP has, IBM has, Sun has and - believe it or not - even Microsoft has. We do that as part of a well thought out and well understood business strategy.
I understand open source. I do open source. I do so because I am aware of what it can and can not do for a company. I think I have a pretty good understanding on what's going on in this business. If it becomes the norm that the people providing outsourcing, system administration, hardware, and consulting make orders of magnitudes more money than the creative force, the software engineers and architects who are envisioning and building the foundation for this industry, something is stinking. And it stinks a lot already. If you've got the time, follow the threads and trackbacks. It's interesting reading and geeky debate fodder, especially for you young'uns who haven't had a proper free/open source vs proprietary argument yet.
[The Farm: The Tucows Developers' Hangout] // Presented to get you to visit all this if you haven't already bitten. Highlighting is all mine.
|
|
