Rancid wrote:Anyway, given that you apparently do know (that sucessful) open source projects are corporate sponsored. How does this make open source moral relative to closed source? Practically speaking.
Open source is not always more moral than class source, my argument is that it is desirable that core software infrastructure is opensource. A situation where you are relying on trust for your operating system is to my mind highly undesirable. Sure opensource is no guarantee, that the software is not acting malevolent or accidentally harmful ways, but I feel a much higher level of trust that anyone can examine the source code, even if I don't choose to examine it myself.
The second is the ability to modify it or have others modify it for one. I don't claim KDE is perfect or that it is everyone's perfect, but to me its intolerable that some corporation should decide how my desktop is organised.
But the third point is the need to attenuate this incredible concentrations of power that closed source operating systems enable.
The fourth point is that for core functionality, functionality which has wide spread use open source does produce higher quality code. We need the freedom to innovate but also there are huge gains to be reached when we move towards common standards. Now I'm quite aware of the limitations of opensource monetarisation models. I've never bought the "What about Red Hat" bollocks. its long been obvious to me that the Red Hat monetarisation model was not reproducible. there could only ever be one Red Hat. You can only produce Grand Theft Auto through a closed source monetarisaton model. if someone hands ownership of the IP for Grand Theft Auto 5 don't hold you're breath waiting for me to opensource it.
The majority of software should be closed source or at least contain a closed source component.