[kolla]

Originally Posted by Photon

There is no "authors should" regarding their sources. The sources are the result of actual work and not some abstract substance to be assimilated into an impersonal, featureless information age Nirvana-fog.

Well, I was merely commenting on Jim Drews bombastic and totally flawed oppinion about open source in general - look what he writes.

I can't imagine why any real developer would just give away years worth of work for free.

Does Jim suggest that open source developers are not "real" developers? Why does Jim think open source = "giving a way for free", wasn't that a discussion that was finished 15 years ago? Why are all big companies contributing to open source - could it be that in the end, it means better products and improved revenue for all?

I would rather delete my source than turn it over to open source. Besides the potential lost revenue, some nut will change your code to do something that was not part of your plan for the direction of the product (I have seen this happen a few times already).

Here he is essentially saying "FU" to his customers, they have no business improving his precious code. Of course, there is pretty much nothing he can do about people disassembling his products, creating patches, learning from his code. Remember Shapeshifter? Remember Joe and Jim's reaction when Shapeshifter was released? Today there is Basilisk II that is open source, cross platform and works well on modern, relevant systems, whereas Fusion... yeah, that's a funny story. Personally I could not care less if all Fusion software vanished - I have legal copies of both Fusion and iFusion, and I also have the Emplant board and whatever software came with it. None of these products worked well in my experience, and getting bugs fixed was hopeless as Jim and Joe were typically busy on the next "big thing", be it PPC emulation (which eventually became iFusion (crash party for me - MOL was way more useful and stable), or Fusion for PC, which I believe they eventually sold to a company that ironically released source code of all their products when they folded - except for the bits they had bought from Jim&Joe.

Open source is great for non-commercial applications. The commercial developers should keep their code so that product's integrity remains.

Software reflects the ideas and skills of the developers. Integrity is not necessarily a good thing. Here I see a person who certainly has skills, and who wrote some "great hacks" (mac68k emulators) a long time ago, products that I personally found buggy, unstable and overly hyped up, even back then. And this guy has been reactionary to any form of open spurce, for his entire professional life, but at the of the day - where is his superior software? Why are people today using open source Mac68k and MacPPC emulators? Why is there something called WinUAE? How does it even support PPC emulation? Yeah, because open source. Why do we have cloud computing? Because open source. Why do we have SDN (software defined network)? Because open source. Cheap and feature-rich Internet also to the developing world? Because open source. Android? Because open source. iOS? Because open source. Juniper and JunOS? Because open source. D-link, Huawei, LinkSys... because open source...

Open source has been the enabler for so much technology and so much scientific as well as social progress.

Luckily, Jim belongs to a dwindeling group of "developers" whos legacy is nothing and that will be forgotten, whereas what survives and pushes technology further, for most part is open source. It's just the evolution of the technology, survival of the fittest - open software is much easier to make fit. Real developers know this. Even Microsoft knows this, as they recently spoke about the possibility of open sourcing Windows. Revenue is now elsewhere for them, and open sourcing the OS enables it to remain relevant longer in an industry now dominated by cloud services.