Robert Glass is one of my favorite writers on the subject of software development, and 10 years from now his book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering will still have an honored place in the "always relevant" section of my technical library. But, alas, he doesn't understand the relevance or importance of Open Source in any way, shape, or form:
“...open source is most prominently about building software products for no financial compensation...There is a faint whiff of Communism about the concept of working for no financial gain”
Wrong. Open source is primarily about programmers building products for themselves and for other programmers. If you don't get that, you don't get Open Source. There's nothing particularly altruistic about this, and it's worth noting that all of the successful OS projects are meritocracies. It's also worth noting that the best known advocates of Open Source and free software - Eric Raymond and Richard M. Stallman - are libertarians, not communists. The comparison to Communism is a cheap shot - the kind Darl McBride would make - not a serious comparison or analogy.
A much better analogy would be to the writers and scholars of the early Renaissance. They didn't support themselves by publishing their writings and they didn't expect to. The wrote and studied because it was what they did. They supported themselves by seeking the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. This isn't too different from what Linus Torvalds does, and there's no better example of a wealthy and powerful patron than IBM, which supports a wide variety of OS projects and programmers.
And what kind of things are these programmers building for themselves and others? Tools. Not applications. Tools. Tools made by craftsman, for other craftsman, so that all of these craftsman can get down to the serious work of creating applications for paying customers. In a few short hours, I or any other aspiring programmer can download and install all of the tools they need to create any kind of application for free. I don't need to fork over several thousand of my own dollars for someone else's ideas about what kind of tools I need. I can get the ones I want - for free - from my peers, who have a far better understanding of what I need than the program managers and marketeers in Microsoft Developer Relations. This, surely, is a motivation that anyone can understand.
Glass then goes on to natter about the “...critical importance of the economic model to the open source movement”. Critical to who? Not to the Open Source developers themselves. The “economic model” was invented by the VCs and execs who wanted to exploit the Open Source phenomenon, not by OS developers and users. Linus Torvalds isn't going to stop working on Linux 2.6 if all the companies selling Linux go under.
Glass makes a more interesting point when he compares OS to SHARE, one of the user organizations that thrived in the late `50's and early `60's before the Justice Department ordered IBM to unbundle software from hardware sales. He states that “for those of us who lived through the era of software that was free and open because there were no alternatives, a return to the notion of free and open software feels like a huge regressive step”. Perhaps it does. But having begun my career in a proprietary marketplace in which the most basic tools - like a C compiler - cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, the availability of thousands of tools, libraries, components, and code snippets is a kind of Utopia. And having to go back to proprietary toolkits is unthinkable.
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