Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times) [LWN.net]

Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

Posted Oct 22, 2004 19:11 UTC (Fri) by pjs (guest, #10927)
Parent article: Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

I wonder just how long Richard believe the "long haul" is, in which the ultimate demise of free software will occur?

Stallman started GNU about 20 years ago. Torvalds started about 14 years ago. KDE for 7 years. Apache, Perl, MySQL... all been going strong and getting stronger for many years. Sure, some projects have failed, some become obsolete, but as a whole, open source just keeps on growing.

His "recipe for immense resentment" so far hasn't been a significant factor yet. He doesn't offer any explaination for what circumstances will make this pervious non-issue into the ultimate failure of open source. We used to hear this arguement years ago, when Red Hat and others went public and IBM became a player. Suddenly, the profit motive would make all existing contributor resent their inability to reap financial reward. It seems plausible then, that a change was at hand that could undermine developers' motivation. That was years ago and it didn't come to pass.

It's an old argument. Hopefully soon the (also old) "GPL never been tested" (followed by predictions it will be unenforcable) arguement will be put to rest by IBM's 8th counterclaim (SCO infringed IBM's copyrights by distribution in violation of GPL).

But no matter how old, how weak, how thoughly discredited... it seems there'll always be more people like Richard A Epstein who either just don't like free software, or are in league with Microsoft (note the last paragraph), and have no ethical problem repeating these old meritless argments.

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