[dmurray]

> Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already.

There's a Cunningham's Law parallel here: the best way to get a good free open source system is to first build a terrible expensive proprietary one with shady business practices, and let the frustrated users do the rest.

[Cullinet]

I think you missed the part where large numbers of people are forced to use the bad system wasting time but only paid salaried time they're not too concerned about so that they'll spend even more of it complaining about the need for a replacement and extolling the virtues of any other system they'll never actually use, and the bit where you pay for lots of highly skilled experts to get the bad system running and doing the least of things for big organisations who think there's no alternative to spending huge budgets for employing the programmers who ultimately take all of this experience to exhort the open source developers what is really required for a successful and excellent replacement and become independent consultants paid by different big organisations to give advice on how the new open source software is going to solve all their problems and set up the teams and management required for adopting the new open software, whilst the open source developers listen to these voices and target unrealistically difficult features and architecture and never get around to noticing that the only thing that anyone actually wanted done was the few really basic tasks that just happened to be too difficult to implement in the original badly conceived product.

[machiaweliczny]

That would work if code was reqired to be OSS.