Eben Moglen (left) tells it like it is.
(Credit: James Duncan Davidson)Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.
Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.
The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.
Why?
... Read moreI've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Conference for years and have watched an interesting thing happen. 
A rising number of attendees have come with Mac OS X-based laptops. In fact, throughout the tech world, you see a dramatic increase in the number of people toting Macs. Why?
The Mac, after all, is a closed platform, just as Windows is. In fact, arguably, Apple is a more proprietary company than Microsoft has ever thought of being, controlling hardware and software alike. Just look at how Apple has managed its iPhone product: developers were initially shunned, and then they were allowed to crawl onto the device through the browser (and not a community-based browser like Firefox, but rather through its own Safari).
As a die-hard Mac addict and open-source advocate myself, I was thinking this morning about why the two increasingly converge, despite all the ironies and conflicting approaches. Here's my best guess.
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Mike Olson and I shared the stage at OSCON recently, talking about whether all software should be open source. I was planning to post about this, since I didn't feel that I had explained my position well on stage (having both Mike and Tim against me didn't help.) But Mike apparently also felt that he had more to say, and has blogged it here.
Unfortunately, reading Mike's clarifications (posted in response to some apparently rude e-mails sent to him after the fact, which is not appropriate) makes me think that I disagree with him more than I thought I did. Mike is a wonderful person and a great addition to the software community. But his perspective is wrong on the value of source code. Here's why.
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