Open source is one the biggest scam of the lasts decades. And as all big bad wolf, it is hidding in sheep clothes. It's a perversion of a nice idea. It all started with the free as in free speech software mouvement. But the contagious characteristics of freedom prevent sane business to build upon it. As business drive this world, freedom let place to open source. It was good for business. You don't have to pay for licenses anymore. You can concentrate on your business. And it gets better over time for free. Ohoh, the scam arguments starting to appear.
So companies all over the world started to adopt it. Some companies, even promote it. They can now outsource for free their I.T. development. They can also share the cost of maintenance with their competitors. But the better part for companies, is that they got leverage on their developpers. There are now two kinds of I.T. man, the vast majority are I.T. workers spending their time assembling, maintening and pipelining the various bricks of open source software, where as the remaining minority is consenting to create great wealth and be rewarded with breadcrumbs. If you want to be a part of the glorious minority, all you have to do is to participate in open source. This is why companies often requires you to have contributed to an open source project before they employ you. For companies, contributors are like old prostitutes, they don't shine but they will do anything for a few dollars.
But who get spoiled in the way ? Well obviously, the I.T. man is getting lifted.
Then there are all the companies that use open source. They think they are getting advantage of it, but in fact they are the fall guys. By using open source, they surrender and consent to be a few years late, their developpers always running to catch the next patch. It's basically saying they are refusing to compete on the software ground.
So I guess that in a concurrential world where companies collude, end users are getting spoiled too, aren't they ?
No comments:
Post a Comment