A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 17:47 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: A think tank's view of free software by epa
Parent article: A think tank's view of free software

> Indeed, even if none of the points had any validity, they are still
> _perceived_ as valid by these hundred or so business people.

A few points have more or less validity, but this is not an objective or balanced report. It reeks of careful steerage of unsophisticated business people by biaised consultant(s).

While it repeats common misconceptions that may be perceived as valid by some business people, some of the points just lack any relevance to software customers and only make sense if someone "helped" formalising the report, putting an heavy spin on the think tank more confused and neutral reflexions.

"Finally, OSS and proprietary models continue to converge. Proprietary companies are taking elements of the open source model...": no business people I know of would write this kind of drivel by themselves:
those who care about "the open source model" know enough to dismiss this (the business people approach to the open source model is "are we independant from $greedy_big_vendor", and open source fakes typically fail this test)
those who don't care just don't care