The roots of open source software are in the early days of computing when organizations like USE, DUO, and SHARE were founded to help researchers to share their programs. Despite the gradual commercialization of software, open source has continued to appeal to people, perhaps beacuse of its higher, noble motives.
But I am afraid that the most spirited open source preachers are damaging the movement. They are turning open source, which is a great idea and a noble cause, into a rigid and dogmatic religion.
Then again, that's what seems to happen to all even remotely interesting intellectual achievements--as they gain followers, they are slowly turned into stupid religions.
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The debate between religious F/OSS (*) preachers (RMS) and the more practical minded people (like Linus) has been going on for as long as there has been F/OSS. These days there are so many people involved with F/OSS that the voices of the preachers aren't relatively speaking as loud as before. And that's probably a good thing. But preaching isn't always bad (says a self proclaimed preacher :)
(*F/OSS as in Free/Open-Source Software)
Yes. It occasionally seems that FOSS is turning into a moderate movement, but it is my impression that every now and then the extremists raise their heads again. But I'm not saying "cut those heads off". There probably need to be extremists so that we know where the middle-way goes.
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