On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 01:37:54PM -0500, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: > >> * There's less incentive to develop new changes: unless you can afford > >> a stable of developers large enough to deploy new features faster > >> than your competitors can copy them, you gain no competitive > >> advantage from innovation. Software gets developed only to scratch > >> personal itches. > > > > This sure sounds like a (poor) argument against open source in general. > > Not at all. Open-source is great for infrastructure software -- > Linux, Apache, Emacs. Many companies have private modifications to > Linux or Apache which they use internally; some of these get released, > some don't. Everybody benefits by contributing to the common good. > For example, several network infrastructure companies use Linux on > their embedded devices, release kernel changes and improvements, and > keep their core technology in-house. It's not that it's under a > proprietary license, just that it's not distributed at all. This > model works wonderfully for the free software community and for those > companies.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm saying that your argument (top quote) can be applied to open source in general, and we all know it to be false in that case; so how are web apps so different? -- Glenn Maynard