and about motivation in writing open source.

suddenly, programmers write code just because they like to do this. yes, programming is interesting, amazing, entertaining thing. it's a game of mind. nobody thinks °I gonna do this in the name of freedom" or something like this. no, far from this. people just have a lot of experience and with experience in development every programmer gets built up a stash of interesting ideas to tinker with in his spare time. so these experiments and pet-projects become the basis of open source code and always were. not ideology, not some abstract ideas, not user demands, but pure curiosity and courage to write something really interesting makes people spend hours for writing some open source. they know they can make it better and they do. it's a kind of escape from the terrible commercial code they have to deal with at work (yes, most people have their work routine being far from their dreams and ideals).

but for this uppy state of mind and keeping activity in spare time a programmer must be wealthy enough, to get rid of mundane problems like basic daily food and life support. so, the capitalism is the moving engine of open source, whatever one might assert. yes, people work for commercial projects and their spare time they may devote to coding for fun. otherwise open source would not exist. it didn't appear in USSR, or China. it is a pure side-produst of strong econoimics and capitalism. there's no open source trend in poor and undeveloped countries. so don't under-estimate this when you consider the impact of open source on commerce. they're deeply dependent on each other.

#thoughts #development #opensource

@iron_bug is gnome proprietary now or something? you are not talking about open source but your own primitive notion of perfect world. Corporation invest in FOSS not to take over with some evil intent and control the minds of the developers through magical power of money, that makes no sense, they do it to create a level playing field when one of their competitors gets too far ahead. It's a result of a competition in free market, being a naturally superior way to do R&D, it allows them join forces to gain ground on a given monopolist. When most corporations in the world are face with a choice - either microsoft takes over the world or nobody takes over the world, they obviously choose the latter. This is how gcc, linux, bsd and many other large open source projects came to be.

What GPL does is make sure that once they leveled the field it stays level forever for everyone, they can't hide any cards up their sleeves from that point on. It doesn't in any way ensure that you can single handedly build a skyscraper that will be in every aspect exactly what you like it to be. There will always be other people involved, you will have to work with those other people and find a common ground, and if what they want is not what you want you'll have to deal with it, nothing to do with open source vs proprietary software.