[omail]

This article is difficult to understand because it is written as a flamebait rather than an objective critique.

Here is what I understand so far. His primary point is that for a FOSS project it is not easy to have it economically self-sustainable. I believe he is almost correct on this point and counter arguments exist elsewhere in this thread and on the internet. As for whether FOSS is useful or not or how to solve the problem described, he gives no suggestion. However, he does take many cheap shots at RMS and FOSS supporters.

Anyhow, my counterpoint, which I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is the contribution of FOSS is beyond direct monetary compensation. For organizations FOSS provides cheap, commoditized off-the-shelf parts for internal software projects. For consumers, FOSS allows independence from software producers and system lock-ins. These benefits are real in economic terms and can not simply be waved away.

[ewjordan]

Further, the funding of a lot of free software has already taken place because a company needed to scratch its own itch. After that, the question is, "Does keeping this software closed source provide us a significant competitive advantage?" If the answer is "no," then there's really no point in not sharing the source. Anyone that thinks shrink-wrap sales of their pet Lisp dialect are going to make up the cornerstone of a viable business model is freaking deluded; these things are dime a dozen, and the market is next to non-existent.

Pretty much all of the open source stuff that comes out of Google comes out for this reason; they're not in the software sales biz, so if they develop something neat that helps them get things done but is not core to their business, they give it away. Economically speaking it's neutral to positive for them (helps PR quite a bit, and gets programmers invested in the Google ecosystem), and positive for everyone else.

My immediate response to the article: no shit, software takes time to write, even the most hardcore FOSS advocate wouldn't claim otherwise. But once those costs are funded (which they will be if you need the functionality yourself), if there's no money to be made by keeping the results a secret then you should be indifferent to opening it up. Yes, this means that FOSS is driven more by big companies than by basement programmers, because they generate a lot more code, but nobody ever claimed otherwise, except when constructing strawmen to knock down.

I was going to bring up the obvious point that most of the Internet runs on FOSS software (convenient not to mention Apache in a rant like this, arguably the producers of the most successful FOSS in existence), but upon checking, I can't call him out for hypocrisy - check out any non-existent url (for instance, http://www.lambdassociates.org/doesnotexist), at least he's actually drinking the Microsoft Kool-aid as he rails against the poor quality of open source.