Jim Grey Says Open Source Software a Threat to Entire Software Industry


Interesting juxtaposed to what I'm listening to at OBSC:

For-profit software companies will struggle for a business model against free software, said the official, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Jim Gray. He served on a panel pertaining to software trends, XML, Web services and grids at the Software Development Conference & Expo West 2004 show here on Monday evening.

"The thing I'm puzzled by is how there will be a software industry if there's open source," Gray said, disagreeing with a fellow panelist over the impacts of open source.

Typical of most attacks on open source, this assumes a binary world where everything either has to be open source or closed source. That's not the case. As Larry Lessig just said, property rights are about deciding what you can give away. Statements like the one from Grey seem to cry for some kind of jihad against open source to save the industry. It doesn't have to be that way. No one's forcing Microsoft to open its source. The market may decide it doesn't like that. If so, then so be it.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:20 2019.