I am a big proponent of the open source software philosophy but since I am no developer my contributions to open source comes in the form of usage, testing and promotion. In my mind it is one of many ways to combat the restrictive Enterprise solutions (which usually leans heavily on OSS anyway). There is no inherent wrong with closed source but it tends to end up with shifting the focus from making good products and move it towards protecting the business model of the producing entity.
Freedom!
There is something special about the willingness to produce something and allowing others to use, improve and evolve a product. Rather then using all our powers to lock something down to allow the free expression of creativity and brilliance of the many. To quote a favourite author of mine;
chose again
Rather then allowing stagnation to fester to protect a failing way of thinking allow for others to improve it. That being said, the more extreme licenses are also damaging for OSS.
MIT for the win!
In my humble opinion the best license to use for projects is one that allows the option of also closing the source down and not contribute to the main project. Not because it makes it better from the open source standpoint but rather because it is more free. On the other hand it might be better to force companies to contribute since very few actually donate or push improvements to the code base. Amazon being a bad example of building on top of open source but contributing very little.
To further extend my thoughts on open source I have this idea that municipality should have to require any software delivery to be open source (within reason). Mostly to not feed the dragons that live on delivery of often subpar software. Since the usage of public funds should benefit more then the few. Since this would also allow for better scrutiny of applications and most likely create more benefits for the projects themselves to. Also open source does not mean free…
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