Part of the reason I blog is to improve my understanding of things, even change my opinion as and when I have reason to. This I cannot do unless I read blogs of people whose views are somewhat different from mine, natural selection applied to opensource thought.
Which is why I read Agile Management‘s comments on one of my posts with interest. David Anderson works for Microsoft and holds patents in the internet and telco spaces. So I could be pretty sure his DNA and mine would be somewhat different :-)
So I read. And learned. And I was enjoying it.
Until I saw this:
Confused of Calcutta suggests that commodity features should always be developed as open source projects.
Again at Microsoft we wouldn’t completely agree with this. [And then this] Often open source projects are created as “spoilers” to spoil a profitable market for someone else.
Oh puh-leese. Does he really believe that? Does anyone? Is there something they put in the water (or some other shared utility) to make people think like that?
Opensource is not anticapitalist. It is anti-loss-of-freedom and anti-wasting-money-and-effort and anti-unnecessarily-sometimes-unfairly-constrained markets.
David says “spoiling”.
I say “disrupting”.
Big difference.