[GTALUG] Economist article on open source

[Giles Orr]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 at 08:06, Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On 2019-10-03 1:37 p.m., Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
> >
> >
> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/10/05/the-rise-of-open-source-computing
>
> It's paywalled, so I didn't get to read the bit where it presumably says
> "… and we can get these geek rubes to write our software FOR FREE!"
>

For the same reason, I haven't read the article either.  But since you
didn't let that stop you from making assumptions, I won't either.  :-)

When the Economist tackles a subject, they usually really understand it
before they write an article about it - it's one of the things I've
appreciated about them.  And they wouldn't make a statement like that if
you actually understood the workings of open source.  Without a doubt,
there are people who view OSS that way: they piggy-back on a project, make
money off it by selling services (or worse, the software itself) without
committing back to the project.  And maybe they believe they've suckered
the "geek rubes," but what's being ignored is that the geek rubes chose
(not "were paid to," or "made to," but CHOSE) to write that software out of
personal interest.  I think at this point most of us understand that if you
open-source a project, someone will probably find a way to misuse it - so
you kind of accept that when you add that open license.  I didn't say any
of us like it, but it's ... kind of a known thing these days.

Of course you may have been joking.  In which case I apologize for being
too much of a literalist.  (It's part of my nature.)

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com
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