Old projects and the free-software community

Old projects and the free-software community

But do we really want to keep open-source world in it's ghetto where plumbing tools are all open-sourced yet "real apps" which 99% of users actually use are proprietary?

This is natural consequence of this approach. I mean: most applications out there are used by people who don't know how to fix bugs. Yet there are huge amount of developers who are looking for the problems which they could solve (for fun or otherwise) but they would never hit problems with these applications because, well, they don't use them.

If we want open-source to become a tool of choice (we do want that, right?) then we need to find a way to somehow attract people who don't scratch just their own itch…

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.