Why open source is bad

I work as a developer and earn a reasonable crust doing so. Open source has helped me at times in my corporate development, it has never been a problem, so on balance it is beneficial. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software foundation, has been explaining for decades why you are wrong. Linux, Firefox, MySQL, and the very concept and culture of Open Software only exist because lots of people find these arguments persuasive.

So let the people build the open source world and you worry on how you are gonna make a good business out of it. It appears that the premise of this question is that the only reason to write code is for either fortune or fame; but there is in fact another reason to write code, make software, or for that matter invent any sort of new technology If you're interested in building a high quality software product, you will find free and open source software a dream.

If your product is good, it will sell. When developing a product, you want to spend your limited resources time and money on adding value to your product, not on writing boilerplate code. Open source projects usually produce high quality software because they are open. More programmers can review the source code and contribute patches containing bug fixes, optimizations or more features.

You don't get this luxury when buying software to use in your products. I don't say that buying software is bad. It's bad when you are not allowed to look at it's source code to see how it works or to fix it.

They have different purposes. Copyleft licenses demand that if you distribute your product, you must provide full source code access and must allow others to modify it as they see fit. I think that this is a good thing, but it's more difficult to monetize your work. With copyleft licenses it's usually harder to protect your commercial advantages, but this depends on your business model.

Another thing that I observed is that components released under a copyleft license tend to be isolated when they are integrated in a system, so that they not "contaminate" the whole system. An example is, for example, when you run a GPLed program in a different process or when GPLed components are bundled in a operating system as the Linux kernel.

I personally believe in all the models above because, as in nature, there is always more than one way to accomplish something and you must choose the model that serves your purpose well. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Isn't open source bad for developers themselves?

Asked 9 years, 8 months ago. Active 6 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 7k times. Improve this question. There are a lot of assumptions in your question.

Furthermore, your "points" apply to any tool that's designed to make people more efficient, regardless of whether those tools are open source.

NET would be an example. I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and I have no idea where you got that idea from. If anything, open source technologies open more opportunities for everyone. Smash the Spinning Jenny! Burn the Rolling Rosalind! Destroy the Going-up-and-down-a-bit-and-then-moving-along Gertrude!

Not that I'm really accusing you of being a luddite To look at it in a wider context this is one of the ways we progress as a society so cooking, cleaning and washing don't take up 12 hours of our day, as it were. If your argument is "productivity is bad," then you must hate the Industrial Revolution.

And yet you use a web 2. Productivity and openness tends to help everyone in the long term. At least it seems to? Show 4 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. I would say that, factory labors don't like whatever dell is doing, and that book authors don't like the contents on the internet, because they are competitors to each other. But in this open source scenario, programmers are making stuff that competing themselves, which is strange. Andy - you don't seem to be objecting to open source so much as high level code that lets people create value without having to do a lot of expensive low level work.

It's like saying Excel is bad for programmers because every office would otherwise have teams of Cobol programmers doing accounts apps.

In this case, IE6 was the best thing that ever happened to web devs. Andy -- nowadays you get paid for your work , not that much the product itself. Say you create a tool, it's good enough and people buy it. Then, if they want some functionality added to it, even if it's open sourced, the first person they'll naturally turn to will be the initial author.

You get paid for the added value you provide, not everyone is a programmer, same way you hire someone more competent to do your taxes etc. Show 1 more comment. Also, there are many contributors to open source and free software that get paid for it.

Let's say the job is to create a blog website, you would probably need 2 programmers using plain php work on it for a week, but with rails, you can have 1 programmer get it done in a day. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Microsoft has admitted it was wrong about open source, after the company battled it and Linux for years at the height of its desktop domination. Microsoft president Brad Smith now believes the company was wrong about open source. Microsoft has certainly changed since the days of branding Linux a cancer.

The software giant is now the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world, beating Facebook, Docker, Google, Apache, and many others. Microsoft has also partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 , and it acquired Xamarin to aid mobile app development and GitHub to maintain the popular code repository for developers. Microsoft is even shipping a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update that will release later this month, and it moved to the Chromium browser engine for Edge last year.

A public apology from the researchers followed. Equally certain, maintainers and project governance are duty bound to enforce policy and avoid having their time wasted. But killing the messenger seems to miss at least some of the point — that this was research rather than pure malice, and that it casts light on a kind of software and organizational vulnerability that begs for technical and systemic mitigation.

The right DAM will work with you to build completely new features for your specific use cases. It took time and resources, but those are two things our dedicated team is willing to provide for clients. We also believe in great customer service which is why, according to G2 Crowd, our customers have voted us 1 for Customer Satisfaction repeatedly. We think that if you need to hire someone to manage your DAM, it kind of defeats the purpose of getting a DAM to make your life easier and save you money.

Do you want your technology to be crowdsourced?