Re: Proxies, opensource and the general market: what's wrong with us?

On 2011-04-26 02:29, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
> I agree with you that it's not necessarily "crap" but OSS
> generally means "free" which also means that one or two
> OSS solutions suck all the oxygen out of the bottom of the
> market - while the commercial offerings dominate the middle
> and the top. If you get into a feature war with a commercial
> product that has 20 engineers working on it, full-time, you
> are not going to win if you're a typical OSS project.

I would differ here. The OSS projects having momentum have much more 
(and better) engineers working on them in full time than any commercial 
venture could pay for. I especially like the "better" part. Imagine 
Linux Kernel Inc., Orlando hiring 300 kernel hackers. Would they be all 
up to the job? Now imagine 300 companies worldwide hiring one kernel 
hacker per company. One who have to be good enough to create patches 
accepted upstream, because the viability of the products (hence the 
company) depends on it, and in turn gets THE dream job of anyone who 
knows what open source is. High standards and high motivation.

Well, one can do a development project either professionally or 
unprofessionally, and in both cases it can be open source or closed one.
The difference between OSS and closed source is whether one believes in 
other things than money. (And even this is less and less true, as open 
source as a business model gains momentum.)

Granted, doing an open source project professionally today is much 
harder than it should be.