thoughts on esr

[rpeterson at yellowbank.com (Ron Peterson)]

Timothy Hobbs wrote:

> I think that even if business-critical software
> providers do port their products to linux, the closed
> source nature of (most) of those products still flies in
> the face of esr's pitch to CIO's that "you need control
> of your source so that you can change it".

Are you saying that some products are inherently closed source?  If so,
why?

> So with some of the erp/accounting software ported to
> linux, linux may be installed more often but the open
> source culture is not extended.  Which one is more
> important?  ;)

I really don't think it will be long before you see open source erp &
accounting applications.  Accounting, by its very nature, lends itself
handily to an open source solution, because one of the primary
requirements of a good accounting package is that it abide by generally
accepted accounting principals.  Which, of course, are open.  And what's
erp but a big honkin' database running business process schema.  A lot
of work, sure.  And of course it needs to be reliable if your going to
run your business on it.  Like a rock.

So maybe we should only run erp apps on windoze, because closed source
results in inherently stable products.  Ahem.

I don't buy the argument that open source is o.k. for "simple" projects,
like an operating system kernel, but inappropriate for such complicated
machinery as a database.  For one, not to diminish anyone's efforts, but
I think database vendors exaggerate the difficulty of what they do.

But more importantly, I refuse to believe that multi-million dollar
stock options are the only way possible to motivate someone to do good
work.  That is simply absurd.  Sooner or later, people will have to wake
up to the realization that no-one wants to pay many thousands of dollars
for a product, any product, that has a distribution cost of almost zero.

So to answer your question, open source is more important.  I don't care
how sweet your honey pot is, if it's not open source, I'm not buying it.

There's more to all of this than the purely pragmatic notion that open
source results in better code, and idea that ESR likes to promote. 
There's also the issue of freedom, which RMS tirelessly promotes.  Open
source is a pragmatic ideal.  Freedom is something larger.

IMHO...

Ron Peterson
rpeterson at yellowbank.com
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