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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
"Dave once said open and closed source are best seen like hot and cold running water. You need to be able to mix the two. I haven't run across a better metaphor than that." If true then closed source is hot and if you use too much of it you will get burned. Open is safer. There's another force at work here. The only companies that can afford closed source are the really large ones. Think about that. If you are not a really big company, I probably won't buy your product unless I can get source code. Oracle can stay closed source, IBM, Microsoft, but anyone smaller and I'm not going to use your product unless I get source. Its just too risky for my (typically huge) client. So having closed source and being small is costing the small developer the ability to sell to large clients. Sounds unfair perhaps, but should Pac Bell build a customer service application in something like Dan's killer scripting language? No way. If Dan hits the lotto or gets hit by a truck then millions of dollars in development effort evaporate instantly. Its a hard sell and I wouldn't risk my professional reputation by even presenting it. Its a lot easier to push something like php for the same job because we know that if the php developers suddenly move on, we're not up the creek. I'm not trying to argue a point, just share a view. Closing your source closes doors. There are responses to this message:
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