Gosh, dare I post on this thread?
I worked for 10 years at Bell Labs, and the inventors of UNIX are good friends of mine. But then I also worked at Microsoft Research for 5 years, and I use Windows XP 64-bit at the moment. My feeling about UNIX is that it's yesterday's news. Technologically, it really is pretty out of date compared to Windows NT.
I think sharing source code is all fine and good, but I do not like the zealous political movement that has grown up around open-source. It's all too easy to sit back and demand that *other* people share and give up their right to economic gain. Open source seems like a great idea to liberal journalists and college professors and idealistic students. But what about the rights of professional programmers, inventors, musicians, etc?
Call me old fashion, but I believe economic incentive has served as an excellent stimulation of innovation in America. Stallman and Raymond claim that "hackers" are the real inventors of computer innovations, but that's really a lie. I can't think of any important hardware or software invention that was done by a hacker, unless you really think EMACS is wonderful. Overwhelmingly, the computer revolution has been a product of American capitalism: IBM, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Intel, DEC...
Instead I see the open source community working on cheap rip-offs of commercial products -- open office, gimp, MySQL, Linspire, etc. They aren't doing any research or inventing, they are just looking around at what Microsoft or Adobe or Apple are doing, and then go and copy it. I ran part of my book through Open Office to see how it did text justification, and I was astounded to see it did letter-for-letter the same as Microsoft Word. They had just reverse engineered Microsoft's typography engine! That kind of thing doesn't really benefit the world the same way that an honest new invention does.
OK...let me put on my asbestos suit now...
