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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
What happens if you subtract away all the closed source in the world? What happens if you subtract out only the small developer closed source? What happens if laws are passed requiring all source be open? These are serious questions. Because if you look at the matter dispassionately, the percentage of closed source softare in the marketplace is freaking huge. And there are billions of happy users and customers building economies and civilizations with the stuff. This is not lost on commercial open source developers like Collabnet, Caldera, Trolltech, VA Software and Borland. They're answering those questions with mixed commercial and open source licensing schemes. It's not a comfortable subject in the open source world (I'm about the only writer talking out loud about it) but that's what's happening. And it's because these companies need to do business in the real world marketplace. Again, I don't think this needs to be as complicated as it seems, but it is, because it's political. Craig Burton says most of our problems are technical, political, or both; and the political ones are the toughest to solve. Once again, the problem with the Open vs. Closed battle is the OR logic that comes out of the politics. In the real world, the answer most often is AND. There are responses to this message:
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