Earth to Matt
While I hate to give him further press — Matt Asay, in this blog on cnet, mistook my blog post about common OSS misconceptions as evidence to support partially closed source business models. Apparently he cannot read very well, and I fear he sets a poor example for someone given such blog placement.
My blog post was intended to address some things OSS does not do automagically, so that when folks aren’t seeing immediate results, they don’t give up — but can instead concentrate on reaping the rewards of what it can do — and understand what the potential roadblocks they have to clear may be. Basically if I had to summarize my own post for the ADD crowd — communities take effort and are some of the least understood and most poorly mined things we have, and we all need to focus on them — not just a few folks dedicated to the task, but everyone, and this is somewhat of a black art. Such communities do not solve all problems overnight, are not perfect, and they do take investment, sure. But was that an argument for saying “hold components back”? No.
A proper OSS model where everyone works for you and you’re not sharing everything isn’t truly open… it’s a house with windows, with the community all on the outside looking in. It’s not the drum circle that we want it to be. I has no “network multiplier” or “butterfly effect” attached to it. It is not how we’ll change the 21st century.
In one of his speeches at Red Hat, I think Matthew Szulik said it well — “Open Source is not a bullet point”.
Sure — building any sort of collaborative infrastructure is hard. Yet there are those that want to sell open source as that (another bullet point on a slidedeck), and then there are those that believe software is open, that information should be free, everyone can work together with everyone, we are all equals, and that we will keep no secrets.
