When you download Open Source Software, you are downloading Communism. (Cue Spooky Music)
Look. The fascists at the RIAA and MPAA strike again!
Hardware has long been a commodity, thus why it is so cheap, and software is quickly going that way as well. Capitalism still has a much needed place in services to support and augment the commodities. A person or business should be able to choose the products that make the most sense to them...poey on this kind of crap.
Open source users are subversives, commies, and a blight on free enterprise. (Shuffling sound while BtD riffles through his Microsoft stock). Except when it’s me.
Patents/copyrights have a long tradition of taking things in the open source community and limiting their access for profit.
Post-it notes are a good example. For a hundred plus years print shops would take their scrap paper, jog it in stairsteps, apply rubber cement (or similar) and quickly collapse the stair-steps to create post-it noted. It was in the public domain. It never occurred to anyone that this open process could be patented. Then 3M came along with a hokey story and a great PR blitz that snowed people into believing it could have exclusive ownership fo what had been in open source for a century.
The status of some code is curious. Sears and IBM created ADVANTIS. Then Allstate, Discover, Coldwell-Banker children of Sears continued to USE ADVANTIS as did unrelated firms like Spiegel. As a consultant I could bounce from shop to shop and have access to all that code I knew had come from other shops. Every shop encouraged all designers and coders to “steal” the code already written. And yes, the word “steal” was used in writing with the flippant inference expected. ADVANTIS expected it to be a big selling point that such a large base of proven re-usable code was available to ADVANTIS users.
For various reasons IBM and Sears didn’t know how to capitalize on what they had. The potential was barely touched.
I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it's an example of the free market in action. When companies can't compete with huge, crushing competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn't state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).
This is as clueless a statement about Open Source as it gets. It never was about companies wanting to use software without license fees. It was about people who wanted certain software (particularly system software) that was not for sale so they wrote it themselves. It just so happens that we gave away the results of our labors so others could benefit and build upon our work.
I got into Open Source (before the name was coined) when I had an AT&T Unix PC (aka PC7300) that was at EOL and certain highly annoying and possibly dangerous bugs were never going to be fixed. In my case it was a bug in strip(1) that caused executables to be deleted if strip was run on already stripped binary. More generally, I do not ever want to be held hostage to system software that I cannot fix when I find a problem.
It's very nice that someone finds our work useful, but without those of us who did all the work, there wouldn't be any Open Source for non-programmers to take advantage of.
I find the situation described in the article as absurd in the extreme. What about my intellectual property rights? I contributed to Open Source software with the express condition that the result be freely distributable in source.
Oh, my. [facepalm] Next, people who don’t BUY computers will be suspect because they’re shirking their duty to convince others of Microsoft’s divinity.
What would the US Government know about capitalism? :)