Open Source Rant
Open source is not synonymous with the GPL/copyleft or free!
That is the really annoying part of the MS rhetoric because the popular media picks up and repeats everything MS says and that spreads the disinformation. Meanwhile, the Linux bigots ("long live the f*ckin' penguin") often take the view that open source means free, further compounding the problem. There are so many great software projects that are open source that aren't subject to the GPL. Linux could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't even give pause to the open source idea.
I know I'm probably preaching to the choir, but regardless of whether the software is free or not, open source is the only viable solution for writing, debugging, and maintaining complex systems (even relatively simple programs have now become part of a system) over the long term. Just the simple idea that one person may discover a bug, but another person may fix that bug works completely differently in an open source environment because everyone using the system has a sense of "ownership", not just the developers or legal owners of the source. MS and Sun (with Java) prove this on an almost daily basis - even if you throw thousands of internal developers and QA testers at a complex suite of code (a system) and further subject customers to the system as unwilling testers you can't even squash all the bugs, let alone improve the software in a timely fashion.
For me, this idea clicked when we were dealing with libwww back in '92 and '93 and I think languages like Python and the numerous open source projects around the world are showing that it really does work. Personally, I think open source is probably one of the biggest benefits the Internet and web have brought to software as a whole.
Note: This story originally appeared on my manilasite, which isn't used much now. Recent confusion and rants by others over open source versus commercial software led me to repost here.
11:20:33 AM 
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