In the real world idealists trump practicals every time, over the course of hundreds of years. Look at the Levellers, look at Tom Paine, they might have gotten beaten back but most of their ideals came to be implemented. Just wait and see.

What is interesting is that most extreme pragmatists actually get angry and upset that idealists have any sort of voice. They seem to think that we should shut up and be quite and stop rocking the boat. Idealists tend to ask hard questions that are not easily answered.

Well there is a time for strategic compromise and there is a time for dialectic problem solving. The problem with most pundits is that they’re not able to do either and instead must worrble on inaccurately with no added thoughts to the conflict at hand. The author here isn’t a pragmatist, he’s just a pundit.

Additionally, pragmatism? Your argument for pragmatism is full of anything but. I’d say it’s more an emotional argument than a logical one, honestly.

You’re right- the absolutely zealous approach to having extremist purity from the FLOSS community is a little confusing. It really is something that people should think twice about before speaking.

However there is one extremely significant point that was omitted here… There is a problem when there is an open source/free counterpart to a software suite (or application, etc etc) but is incredulously limited (to the point where it’s no better than a demo) and the company providing it takes more from the community than it gives. I know such a case is rare, but it does happen. Luckily most open source devs are smart enough to not invest into a project after they realize the company they are dealing with is basically using them.

I mean, the Qualcomm 2D/3D kernel-side driver being open sourced is a prime example to this. David A from Redhat himself felt the insult of this himself. I know this does not -directly- compare to what you’re talking about, but the idea is the same.

A lot of the community is pissed off at the ‘open core’ approach that attempts to explot the community rather than work with it. This is a fundamental difference that can be seen in much of the FLOSS folks’ outrage.

You already have at least 2 blogs, why write here? Anyway, I won’t spend energy on much discussion here, since your article doesn’t seem to bring much to the table that wasn’t argued and counter-argued already. But I’d like to make one correction, hopefully you’ll find this helpful:

quote:
That leaves you with the choice of pulling a business model from the basket of the non-pure business models, where you do one or more of the following:

a. You license your code under the GPL or another free software license, and occasionally sell exceptions to the customers who ask for it (the so called dual licensing)

:end quote

Option a is not correctly classified. I’m not aware of anyone arguing that dual licensing wouldn’t be a “pure” and fully acceptable open source / OSD compliant business model. (It would be an interesting separate discussion to explore why this is, but the opinion here seems to be unanimous.) This is not to be confused with the critics who say dual licensing is a bad business model for making lots of money, or bad for having a really thriving community, but nobody is arguing it is not “pure” open source. (The OSD does not require you to make X amount of money or even to develop code efficiently.)