While I usually care little of any for John Dvorak rants and the talk back
it generated; the following quite drew my attention. He extracted it as
post 349 by an anonymous reader (interesting to see that he does take that
active an interest in his feedback forum):
"OSS is an important effort to replace 'for-profit' motives (with it's
material rewards) with 'for-ego' motives (with it's emotional and
psychological rewards). It's a restatement of capitalism's thesis
('private vice begets public virtue') for an industry in which the
participants feel the immaterial rewards for one's self (prestige) are
equivalent to, or greater than, the possible material rewards for one's
self (money).
"Vanity is the driving force behind OSS, as is greed behind
closed-source
software. Try to use someone's OSS code without attributing original
authorship, and you will see how quickly your quaint "community"
devolves
into harsh campaigns of public remonstration towards the violator. It is
of primary importance that original authorship always be identified.
"This is _not_ the hallmark of a communal environment; it is indicative
of
an environment in which everything is okay as long as people get credit
for what they have contributed to a project. In other words, people in
this community are not driven by altruism over greed, but by fame over
obscurity. "
And it beg's some interesting questions. Though there is a nucleus of
thruth - how does this mesh with groups like Apache, where we like to
think that the longer term goal, and the code base surviving individual
coders, are paramount.
Dw (who likes to be a small camwheel spinning together with lots of other
cam wheels and cogs :-).
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