The Cathedral and the Bizarre

Yep, he's just torpedoing his own credibility with shit-nuggets like :

> What the world does not need is another buggy open source copy of Windows Media Player.

Is this supposed to refer to VLC ?!? (Admittedly that one is not in in the current version of his "manifesto".)

- Somehow using GitHub as an example that Darwinian competition doesn't work.

- Retconning the term "abandonware"

- The tired (and wrong) argument equating counterfeiting to theft. (No wonder that he thinks that mindshare is unrelated to making money !)

> Instead [F(L)OSS] produced a graveyard of dead software; the largest sink of wasted human labour in history - bigger than even the Mao's Great Leap Forward or the Stalin's building of the White Sea Canal.

And after all of this, he has the gall to call F(L)OSS proponent "Zealots" !

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

Unfortunately that only leads to another kind of lock-in. The culture assumes everyone is using the same tools, so you are not allowed to use any kind of non mainstream software. And any smaller project using non mainstream libraries gets killed.

For example I use Mercurial rather than Git. Mercurial had better Windows support, a better command line syntax and with TortoiseHg a better Linux GUI. However, it happens all the time that linux distributions include wrong versions of Mercurial and TortoiseHg. You can use an old version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, or a new version of Mercurial and an new version of TortoiseHg, but the distributions package a new version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, and then TortoiseHg does not start. So they ship a completely broken package and no one cares because it is not a standard tool. (and last time I tried to install TortoiseHg from source separately, it also did not run, because was not compatible to the Python version installed by the distribution)

Recently I wanted to use a tool written in OCaml. It is really well written, has a GUI, using gnomecanvas. And it does not start anymore. Debian/Ubuntu has decided, gnomecanvas from gnome2 is deprecated and will no longer be installed. But the new gnome does not seem to have OCaml bindings. I am not aware of anyone working on a update to fix that. OCaml is too small to be allowed to make GUIs.

I write my software in FreePascal. After a system update, my projects do not start anymore on Android. Turns out binutils has enabled relro by default and FreePascal does not work with relro enabled. Imagine GCC could not create Android apps in the default settings. That would be fixed quickly, but with FreePascal no one cares

This guy is so wrong. Truth is that innumerable closed source programs are abandoned (and that's actually what "abandonware" stands for). However, contrary to open-source, they're nowhere to be seen.

When you're depending upon some piece of closed source abandonware, you're without recourse. If by any chance, you'd be depending upon an abandoned open-source software, most probably it has been abandoned because there are better alternatives; or in case there aren't, you're still free to salvage it from oblivion.

The whole article reeks of bad faith.

There are even times when the source code is abandoned but the object code is in active use :-)

Indeed! Erdos is another great example. 1200+ collaborative papers.