DISQUS

MikeT · 3 years ago

DeLong salivates at the thought of open source failing, even though the irony of it is that Perl and other open source packages made it possible for SixApart to create a tight, cheap blog suite that he uses to post that comment. He also cannot bring himself to admit that most of the "community attacks" on closed source software are done by fanboy trolls, not real developers or supporters. The actual developers and supporters are rarely the utopian ideologues.

Tim · 3 years ago

The actual developers are busy, you know, writing code.

joey5 · 3 years ago

Oracle didn't even do any core filesystem work -- they just decided to port OCFS (Oracle Cluster Filesystem) to Linux and try to get the kernel maintainers to accept it.

That's not to say that OCFS is no good, or that Oracle didn't make a valid contribution -- they did. But it isn't exactly earth-shattering. RedHat's GFS does the same thing. And Oracle just joins a long line of old-school-unix shops trying to get their hacks into Linux (IBM contributed JFS, SGI contributed XFS, etc) -- none of which form any type of key component for most Linux users, who almost universally just use EXT3 or ReiserFS (the two default filesystems).

Answer me this: is DeLong really siding with Ellison over the Open Source Community? I would have thought he'd at least choose his companions a little more judiciously. Oh well, anything that explains away open source must be good and true, so he gets on the boat. Good job DeLong! You're convincing us all now!

PLN · 3 years ago

I strongly suspect it's more the tautological point than the causal one; success -just means- balance sheet impact. What's particularly interesting to me is how many pro-IP sorts are intimately familiar with Bastiat's broken window fallacy in other contexts, but don't see it operating here.