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It's 2017 - we're all living in the Open Source bubble: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3120774/open-source-tool...

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson



Hi, author of the article :)

I don't deny that open source is now more prevalent than it was in the past, I just don't think it's on the verge of taking over the world, where every sector will be open source, especially in the ridiculously short timeline of 12-24 months you stated in the article. There's too much value for certain industries, sectors, or companies to keep some, or even most things close to the chest, and there are plenty of companies that haven't been convinced that opening up their codebase would be worth the extra time and effort it would take to do so.

You didn't even address my example of the game industry, so I have no choice but to assume you either agree with me for that industry or just don't have any way to disprove it.

Yes, Microsoft, once known as the chief closed-source proponent, is now embracing open source more, but that's a single company with completely different management than it had ten years ago and in an environment where they're no longer the king of the development world. And in particular for developers, being more open is usually a good thing because it gives us more freedom when developing. But that's only one sector of the programming world.

I have worked for at least a dozen companies over the years, and while I've incorporated at least little pieces of open source software or libraries in most of those jobs, the resulting codebases for those companies was never opened up, nor was there ever any talk about possibly opening it up. We were generally always too busy working on the next iteration to worry about opening our software up or dealing with that. Additionally, at least once I recall us rewriting our application to remove an open source portal software (uPortal) it relied heavily upon because uPortal was just a convoluted, restrictive mess to try to do any real customization with it.

And quoting William Gibson, is cute, yet proves nothing. He's a talented writer who tells good, believable stories about future technology, but he's hardly a prophet.




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