Quotes of the week

Not sure if I'm just playing devil's advocate for fun, or if its the Friday evening settling, but...

I'm not sure the above quote describes a profoundly negative case in the long run. Yes, short term, Greedy Corp[tm] has taken but not been giving back to the community. In the long term though, they've also experienced a solid case that shows that open source software is good for them and good for the community. Perhaps they've also had an opportunity to learn the advantages of not being a victim of the whims of a proprietary software provider any more.

Further it only takes a very limited time of maintaining a internal fork to conclude that it is easier to use open source if you manage to get your changes merged back to the community version, or at least help others to use the open source software the same way that you do internally.

If such insights does not settle at the top level in the organization, then at least they will settle on the floor. And the folks on the floor tends to percolate up, bringing their experience, either in the same organization or somewhere else.

Meanwhile, short term, Greedy Corp will have used their gains to pay taxes locally and pay staff to develop all those proprietary extensions in the fork. They will anyhow have to work very hard to spend all the gains from the open source solely on luxury yachts for the CxO:s. So it isn't all bad. Assuming we permissive open source developers look for societal gains beyond our own narrow range of interest, the one which commonly is rated in lines of code.

How about that rebuttal? Well, I admit, an immediate objection is that this sounds an awful lot like a variant of trickle down economics, which I certainly don't subscribe to. Still, I'm curious... isn't there some kernel of truth in this Friday evening digression?