Monday, August 12, 2002

Capsule summary of my opinion on the above. They're out of their minds. Open source needs commercial developers to finish the job they start. Open source is very good for infrastructure, very bad for sweating the user interface details. People have to be paid real hard cold cash to work for users at that level. No one volunteers for that kind of work, and rightly so, because it's pretty thankless stuff, and explains why most open source stuff is so unusable. It's real work to get stuff usable. Lots of looping, trial and error.  [Scripting News] Dave is predictably expressing his self interest as a commercial closed-source software developer. I'll follow suit. The world needs open source service firms to finish the job that the open source folks start. Ha. So there. This proposal is insane for other reasons than how he and I make money, but I think in politics it helps to start from an insane bargaining position (see Senator Hollings from Disney). 8:54:05 PM      comment []  trackback []