Ro, I think that Nuno and Martin really covered all that needs to be said, and I don't want to echo what they've explained very nicely. But I do want to point out that what you're seeing is indeed a cultural difference between open source and proprietary worlds. In effect, with liberally licensed open source software, you have the *option* to take ownership of your code. In the proprietary world, that is not the case.
If you are depending on a bit of software that someone else wrote, whether it's a database or operating system or just some little library or javascript thing, you are accepting a bit of risk, in exchange for some value. The risk is that the author might move on and not care about this thing any more, or might take the project in a direction that doesn't benefit you. The value is that you get to use what they have built, at a much lower cost than building it yourself. (Often it's free in terms of $$, but there's also the cost of learning how it works, etc.) I'm biased, but this is based on seeing how this goes in the real world, and being on both ends of getting burned by these things. In the proprietary world, you can find yourself in a situation where the bulk of your system is in fact owned by Microsoft (if you're lucky!), or worse, by a company like Oracle[1], which is explicitly in the business of "extracting value" from their users. Or, you may be married to a company run by someone you know and trust, and then one day, they retire, and the person who follows them runs things very differently. Switching from one platform to another is usually prohibitively expensive. Proprietary vendors know this, that's how they can raise prices to exorbitant levels once you're using their platform. The general MO is to sell these platforms with the promise of support contracts and such, and to tell horror stories about how open source projects get abandoned. But proprietary software projects get abandoned as well! Just ask the Solaris or MySQL users how much support they're getting from Oracle, or how much innovation they're seeing in those software projects. On the other hand, their free spin-offs (Maria and Illumos, respectively) are seeing a lot of innovation and have a much more active community support network. For that matter, compare the experience of sharing code with other users in .NET or iOS vs Perl or Node. Proprietary systems tend to destroy communities, by polarizing them into "the provider" and "the users". Open source communities by necessity acknowledge the reality of project abandonment, because we can't ignore it. We don't have a company buy a project and then slowly squeeze all the life out of its trapped users; the developer says, "Ok, I'm doing another thing now", and that's that. If someone wants to take over, they do. (Usually this is one of the users who depend on it, perhaps someone who was *already* helping find/fix bugs.) If no one cares, then it dies peacefully. --i [1] If it seems like I'm picking on Oracle unfairly, it's only because they're the most evil software company I know of. LIke any large organization, there are a lot of good people working there, and some of them are doing good work; but as a whole, the company is clearly evil. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also not blameless or purely good, but I think that all three at least are trying to be a net benefit for the software industry. -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
