Sentiment Growing for Freeware nytimes.com
Dermot, here's an article from Monday's NYT on the "free software summit" that Raymond talked about in the salon piece. I'm not going to go into either article, just state a few quick points. First, before Microsoft and the PC, source access to the OS was the rule, not the exception, at least for the systems guys. Not just for Unix, for most mainframe vendor OSs too. It had a lot to do with the maintenance problems Raymond talks about, which haven't exactly gone away with Windows. Second, politically these guys aren't exactly bleeding heart commies. I remember some truly, um, unusual usenet dialogue by Eric Raymond where he managed to fit his relationship with his girlfriend into the libertarian economic model. I don't know any of these guys directly, but the ones I've seen anything political from, it's usually off in the libertarian wilderness. I guess they never quite made the leap to full blown Objectivism, though.
Cheers, Dan. |
