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Decollapsation at work Dave has One of my many conversations with Craig was published in the August issue of Linux Journal (see Page 18). Here's a long excerpt from the piece: Linux Journal: So you don't believe that because most of Microsoft's familiar software is closed source, that it sucks? Craig Burton: First, some of it sucks and Linux Journal: But we have seen a number of money-making models outlined by Eric Raymond, first in The Magic Cauldron, and then in the book version of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Craig Burton: Yet by Eric Raymond's own description (in Homesteading the Noosphere), an anti-commercial bias is part of the "hacker ideology" out of which the open source movement has grown. That's one reason that the distinction he makes between a cathedral and a bazaar is more accurately one between a cathedral and a cult. A bazaar is, if nothing else, a marketplace. And marketplaces are by definition hospitable to business. So the culture of open source has a strong steak of inhospitality to business. A lot of this comes from the original Free Software movement, and persists as a legacy in the GPL license, which is in many ways the least open and business-friendly of all the open source licenses certified by Eric's organization, the Open Source Initiative. The main reason I point this out is that this anticommercial bias accounts for the collapsing of distinctions here, because this bias introduces a third axis -- a moral one that runs from bad to good. You can see it running from the lower left to the upper right. Proprietary and Closed are Bad. Open and Public Domain are Good. This is fine if all you want to do is hack code. But if you want to do business, you've got to face rational choices that are all over this matrix, whether you're a supplier or a customer. Linux Journal: Did I hear you say that the GPL is really a moral statement? Craig Burton: Moral and political. To me, the GPL is as much a political statement as a licensing agreement. There's a bunch of stuff in there that's superfluous to licensing concerns. This mixing political with licensing views is what causes businesses to be suspicious of open source. The entire interview is here.
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been asking the tough 
some of it doesn't. In spite of the open source movement, customers are buying it and using it. Further, there are other companies that have leveraged the Microsoft model to make money. On the other hand, there is the constant threat to customers that Microsoft will be trying to lock them in; and there is the constant threat to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that Microsoft will encroach on their businesses. Despite these threats, however, the industry continues to grow and thrive. As a model for making money -- for lots of companies -- we have seen nothing comparable yet from the open source world.
