OpenSource is a fluke, there is no doubt. Its like viralness with a slight bit of planning, but a hell of alot of luck. You see, ive been thinking about my early apps that i made 1+ years ago. I’ve given out so much stuff over the years, mostly with nothing but a donate button in the hope that people give back. It doesn’t happen. People have written whole ebooks centered around using various applications of mine, and even they themselves haven’t given back. It doesn’t really agitate me when people don’t donate, but it does infuriate me when people tell me that OpenSource is the future, and that everyone can live off donations or ads within the applications.
At the centre of everything is this ideal that, nothing is truly original nowadays. When i sell an application that is built in C#, all im really doing is building ontop of what Microsoft has given me. Even building upon code that i find on the web. The ideas coming from my head aren’t really original. When im building my Twitter applications, im only building on a service already provided by Twitter. Hell, even an API provided by Twitter. So can i be selling something that isn’t 100% mine? Surely nothing in this world is 100% original, right?
People often say to me. “But look at Mozilla, Look at Firefox”, or “Look at the thriving SourceForge projects”. Really thats only a tip of the iceberg where you see success from a free and open application. But that is not widespread at all. Most opensource applications that make it big manage to get a massive community behind it that really drives it to success. And thats fine. But to say that every application could be like that is over the top to say the least.
I had this debate with a friend of mine. About, “Would technology be where it is today, without closed source and monetary gain guarantees”. I said hell no. We would seriously be in the stone ages. As much as linux is all cool, and Windows is bloated as shit. Windows has everything integrated, everything plug and play, everything just one click and we are away. Cant say the same for linux.
Maybe thats not the fairest comparison, maybe because Microsoft has billions of dollars to play with and pay developers with. But thats the whole point. Because Microsoft has the monetary backing, they have the drive and the will spending months working on driver compatibility. They have the drive to push technology further and further.
