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I would be a lot more sympathetic to articles like this if they didn't all end with, "and therefore we should all just move back to proprietary licenses." > With the open-source model, the breach is the absence of a business model — not the fact that it is free, but rather, the absence of rules. On the contrary, literally the whole point of the free software movement was to have an absence of rules. The "not needing to pay money" part was a side effect; an optional side effect that developers were encouraged to subvert. People can argue that the lack of rules is a problem, but it's important to recognize that when they say things like this, they aren't saying, "Open Source has some flaws we need to fix." They're saying, "Open Source fundamentally doesn't work, and we should abandon it." Put aside the complaints about Google and DRM, and the main gist of this article is arguing that the "patch" for Open Source is to get rid of forking. |
Well, that kind of is the "open" part of "open source". If you are free to redistribute code, it implies that you are free to fork. I wonder why the author doesn't push for more restrictive licensing models (like GPL) instead?