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Comment by sramsay | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t “spite,” first of all. But “a good long term strategy” for what, exactly?

>because you wanted to fuck Microsoft and the entire concept of proprietary code

I think I would describe that as spite. Is it not? By long term strategy I mean strategy for building things in general. Like, I get it, I don't particularly enjoy using certain Microsoft products either. But once you get that off your company's machines, then what? There has to be somewhere to go from there.

We didn’t “hate” proprietary code (it often came off that way, I’ll admit). We did think it was morally wrong to make money off it. We thought it was like patenting the Pythagorean theorem.

So really, you think “building things in general” required . . . what? Calm acceptance of restrictive licensing and software patents? Or maybe we should have been nicer about it? Again, it’s like “building things” must be properly done the way we currently do it. With lots of lawyers and lots of EULAs.

This strikes me as a profoundly conservative position. How rude those Jacobins were! If only they were more polite. If only they had recognized that we live in the best of all possible worlds . . .

In my experience, it's very easy to denounce something else as wrong, but it's a lot harder to actually put in the work to improve the situation and to demonstrate that things have actually improved. That's all I mean by building things. If you are an open source company, you still need lots of lawyers, lots of licenses and lots of contracts. You can't really avoid that, copyrights and patents are still an issue that everyone has to deal with, because these are still copyright/patent licenses after all. So maybe in some cases things are better but in other cases it seems that they aren't. For myself, I personally won't try to claim the high ground without the results to back it up.

My “results” are Postgres. And curl. And gcc. Etc., etc. Are you seriously arguing that we didn’t put our money where our mouth is?

No, not at all -- it sounded like you were saying the developers and users of such things were being naive, but maybe I'm mistaken. To give an example of what I was saying, if I was contributing to Postgres, it would be because I want to help make a good database and fix bugs. I wouldn't do it because I had a chip on my shoulder about Oracle, even if I did have that (I don't). But that's just me. OTOH I believe Oracle even offers some level of support for Postgres.

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