Making the community link

Hey Matthew, fair comment. In my previous blog, I was overly vague in my criticism. I am more critical of their business plan or more to the point of Chinese open source related businesses that use open source innovations and contribute very little back to the community. There are too many 'consultancy' and 'service' companies here that aren't very innovative and yes, you are right, let them try and fail on their own. But, I also think this is bad for the community in general, as the professionals they hire are doomed from the beginning, get left with a bad taste in the their mouth or are not pushed to innovate and be part of the community and end up working for some closed source development shop; i.e. Microsoft.

I should have stressed the relationship to the community further. Small businesses, just as much as IBM, Sun and other large Linux businesses, are responsible for encouraging more activity in the open source community to attract more people to learn and contribute. Too many local developers see no future in Linux, and part of that is because very few businesses, if any at all, have a good business model.