A few years ago I worked as a journalist, and one of the major events at the time was news photographers hating the fact that newspapers were sending out normal reporters with DSLRs and telling them to take 200+ shots. Most of the time, they took a usable photograph. The pro news photographers said, 'But you can't expect an untrained person to take good photographs!' And they insisted that the papers stop sending out camera-armed news reporters.

The thing with that, though, was that if you John Random Reporter couldn't take pictures of near-equivalent quality to a John Pro Photographer, the papers would stop doing it. But they didn't. If the photographers' point was true, they had nothing to worry about. But they knew they did indeed have something to worry about. The truth was that the amateurs could come close enough to equalling the pros that the trade off versus cost savings was worth it.

There is a parallel here with closed versus open systems. We howl, 'You can't do that!! Closed systems canot possibly equal the innovation and development of open!!' And if that's the case, we have nothing to worry about. Quite possibly, though, that is not the case. The insistence on closed that seems so anathema to much of the history of software development may in fact be a good thing for the end user, and our howls of outrage nothing more than being called on something that is no longer true.

That sense of threat would at least explain the inordinate number of HN stories on this topic.