Selling the Cathedral and Preaching in the Bazaar

First off, let me say that I am a huge proponent of free and open source software. With that said, I am also very much a capitalist. I do not feel these are mutually exclusive characteristics, although some would disagree with me. This article was conceived as a critical review of Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. However, I came across a rebuttal by Nikolai Bezroukov that covers most of my criticisms already. As such, I will limit my discussion to one specific quote that I find to be a blaring fallacy, for different reasons than expressed in Nikolai Bezroukov's rebuttal.

"Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem."

Aside from totally ignoring Brook's Law, this statement has to make you kind of look side ways and ponder... "If this were true, why are OSS projects always dragging on the coat tails of commercial software?" If you really take the time to look at the many open source projects, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack in example, is there really any innovation? Linux was conceived as a reverse engineered Unix terminal. MySQL was a free database server for the masses that lacked "advanced" functionality. PHP is a true child of the Bazaar, morphing however the community sees fit. But PHP is actually continually behind on innovations in programming, only seriously supporting object-oriented programming in PHP5. Apache is really the exception here. It is one of the true success stories of the OSS community, unmatched by a commercial competitor. On any note, the signal to noise ratio in the OSS community is high, so high that I conclude that there is more disruptive technology than quality, innovative software in the OSS community. Not just disruptive to commercial software, but even OSS itself. Both the Cathedral and Bazaar "methodologies" have problems with forks due to disagreements and politics. Situations emerge where one project violates the license/ideology of another project, which is guilty of the same. Which brings me to what I feel is the real threat to OSS and why the quote is such a fallacy. I feel the only way OSS can win the "evolutionary arms race" is through innovation. But the OSS community in general is too caught up in "ethics" and politics to catch on. Even though most of the large OSS projects are reverse engineered clones of commercial solutions, many in the OSS community despise the idea of anyone making a dollar off their work. I can only conclude that the biggest threat to OSS is Zealotry and arrogance. Successful OSS projects seem to have one thing in common, they sold out. The “selling out” part is not my view, but the view of many in the OSS community. The latest example is MySQL selling its soul to Sun. But it was just the last step for MySQL. MySQL had already practiced dual licensing and commercial versions of its software. Now they will offer additional "enterprise" solutions for paying customers. Zend does the same with PHP. Apache has a liberal license. FreeBSD is used by Apple in what are, in my opinion, currently the most innovative products. Even Linus, the credited creator of the Bazaar, refuses to move Linux to the more restrictive GPL3 that could turn off a lot of corporate backing. Yet the OSS community is blind to the fact that the success of these projects is owed in part to their corporate backing and acceptance. Most of the Linux maintainers are, or have been, employed by the likes of RedHat, Google, Novell, IBM, and HP. Most of the successful projects receive funding from these same companies. How can an argument be made that OSS will triumphantly defeat proprietary and closed source software when the core funding and a lot of core man power comes from proprietary and close source providers? Further, the only reason OSS projects “that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem” is because some one with a vested interest can afford to pay for the skilled time. The vested interest usually includes a proprietary systems and closed source software that the OSS project merely complements. I feel the true nature of OSS is the free expression and dispersion of ideas, not an "arms race". So as I write this article in an M$ Office clone based on a failing closed source product from a proprietary company, running on a proprietary OS based on an open source OS, and later post it to one of the seemingly thousand or so PHP blog engines; I will remain agnostic in my OSS views and use what ever software makes the most sense. As long as it isn't GPL3... oops.