Most of my work is closed source – it’s been done within/for companies that have no real interest in releasing the software to the wide community.
There is one primary reason for this – a lot of the power in the software is directly tied into the software itself – things are done that are difficult or tricky. The trick is in the doing, and it gives us a competitive advantage when selling, and gives our customers an advantage against their competitors that use the oppositions’ solution.
I love open source software – it means that I’ve got a huge amount of software that I can draw on to get things accomplished that I don’t have to pay a metric ass-ton of money for so I can get my work done. If open source software did not exist, I would be missing tools like flex, bison, perl, python, ruby and bash all of which get my job done.
But I still use closed source software – java (from snoracle), but there is a huge layer of open source software that we’re using to get the language itself to do the things we need it to do.
So, I read an article that mentions ‘Sparrow’s acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source’ which highlights that there were some bad reactions to the software being purchased.
To those people, I will have to say tough shit. I’ve been shafted year on year by proprietary software companies for the last 30 years. You have no entitlement to updates, you have no entitlement to new major versions. If I bought a car and the newer one came out the next year, would I expect to get the newer one automatically? No, I would not. Yet, for some reason, people expect the newest, shiniest version of the software they bought 5+ years ago. If you want the free upgrade train then hook yourself up with Debian, who have a very strong opinion on proprietary/closed source software, otherwise understand that you only paid for a pass for the train system now, not the jetpack and hovertrain system that will exist in the future.
I use open source software when I can. The reasons are simple. It’s pretty well documented if you can understand nerd, and it generally does what I want it to do without any complaints; and if it doesn’t then I have the facility to mess with it in whatever way I want to get the results I want without issue. All the changes I have made to open source software are available openly. As required by some of the licenses, but I make them available for all pieces of software I modify because #1, I’m not a prick (#2 is because it complies with most of the licenses).
I’d love it if all software was open source – it would make my life easier as I’d be able to use solutions to problems that I need whenever I wanted, using the best solution available. I work on such exciting projects as ‘PAM authentication for TACACS+ users’ that I’m sure there’s a huge, burgeoning community of like minded individuals that need this problem solved. Like f**k there is – I work on topics where there is probably 2 people (external to work) who actually care about the changes I make.
The perils of closed source software are simple – no real user actually cares if it’s open source or closed source. If it’s broken, then they bitch. They have no interest in how it’s broken or why; they just want it to work.