I read a few posts today that made me think that some people have put their brains on idle while their mouths (or, rather, fingers) did the thinking for them. I understand: I do the same thing. Regular readers of this blog will know that I do it…regularly.
One post criticized this blog for having a partial feed. How can a blog devoted to openness have a partial feed??? This conveniently overlooks that CNET relies on page views/advertisements to pay the bills, and so needs people to click through. Were CNET to give everything away for free (as in no advertisements/no money attached to its content), there would be no more CNET. While TechCrunch might like this, millions of others who log billions of pageviews on CNET each year wouldn’t be as happy.
In another turn, Kris Buytaert didn’t like my post suggesting that open-source vendors should anticipate loyalty and a mutually advantageous relationship from their system integration partners, and institute policies to help foster this. I wish I could understand Kris’ argument, but I can’t. The “pay me if you love me but don’t really need me” model doesn’t work (i.e., Support only). Period.
Sometimes we don’t really want the consequences of what we want. We want open source to be all about peace, love, and freedom. It’s not. At least, not to the extent that some of us (myself included) would like.
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