qed’s blog

A cynic indeed! Howard Anderson’s article once again trots out
the line that open source exists only because proprietary software
employs coders that “are making their daytime living working for a
proprietary-solutions vendor (PSV) and spend their nights tearing down
the very house they live in” and that somehow this is true of the
entire open source software library.

That is what is called a generalisation. You take a few examples and
assert that it is universally true. His article is a fairly transparent
attack on open source software, no doubt his employment is dependent on
the ongoing financial support of proprietary-solution vendors in the
form of advertising on his publication. However this assertion simply
denies the existence of a large number of OSS producers who do either
make their living by providing open source solutions or are employed by
an organisation to continue the development of OSS. By denying these
people legitimacy, he is able to assert his central theme that only
PSV’s create solutions, and OSS is a leach on real productivity. Anyone
vaguely familiar with the concept of creativity would help Mr Anderson
out by suggesting that PSV’s usually plunder OSS for ideas and that the
very essence of a PSV usually precludes genuine creativity. Please note
the “usual” qualifiers