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Διάλογος Raymond - Messerschmitt
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Eric Responds: Most of the objections in David's essay can be met with the simple observation that nothing in open source development stops users from paying programmers to get slick user interfaces or anything else they want. His image of beggars roaming the commons is touching but mistaken; these "beggars" have fistfuls of florins to wave around, and programmers will be no slower than other kinds of skilled artisan to notice this. |
David Responds: Alchemy? If selling proprietary products in a competitive market is the criterion, then all mature industries practice alchemy. Eric confuses commerce with scholarship. |
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Eric's examples, which fall within the scope of my first sentence, do suffer winner-take-all effects, and thus open source is an antidote to monopolistic behavior. It has major strengths and weaknesses, but the market (not the profession) will be the ultimate determinant, and success won't be uniform across all types of software. Open source (and its cousins such as open-access publication) aren't subversive; they represent healthy competition among methodologies. But why such an invective against venture capitalists (a.k.a. speculators)? VCs are a needed antidote to stodginess and manipulation and encourage unfettered innovation while actually paying programmers well. |
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