impleri

This week’s WTF goes to a year old report from the Harvard Business School (link) that hashes out the Microsoft vs. Linux/Open Source debate, but from a business/economic factor.  It doesn’t say anything novel, but it gets the WTF award for apparently misunderstanding the nature of OSS.  It’s really quite simple: OSS stands for community involvement, not market shares.  Of course Microsoft will be top dog in market shares because OSS is not about the market. The people who develop Open Source software (especially the GNU folks) don’t use their market shares as the bottom line because for them, it’s about making a piece of software that works and sharing it with the rest of the world.  Drop a line at the folks at Debian and ask them if they’re concerned about Microsoft having more of the market share than Linux: they won’t really care.  Sure, they’ll say that it’d be nice of more people used Linux, but their argument will be one from a coder’s perspective, not a CEO’s.