On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 18:17 -0400, Jeff Johnson wrote: ...
It sounds lie [sic] a great plan, well reasoned, and rational, clearly listing the costs/benefits of creating and participating in a OSS project, and astutely pointing out that any project that doesn't understand the OSS model is eventually doomed.
Its a shame that reality of OSS projects invariably comes to the boring conclusion We're all doomed. from (if nothing else) the 3 laws of thermodynamics.
Well, from this statement at least we will continue:
Zeroth: You must play the game. First: You can't win. Second: You can't break even. Third: You can't quit the game.
A more formal statement of the 2nd law may be applicable: The entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
But the vendor/capitalist model for software has far deeper flaws than the OSS model you've described.
So, paraphrasing Churchill, OSS is the worst form of software development except all the others that have been tried.
73 de Jeff I was born an optimist!
Ah, then hopefully humans can do better than thermodynamic systems! :-)
Cheers, Phil