The swinging pendulum

Dana Blankenhorn closed a recent blog post with the following paragraph:

But even the Little Red Hen has baby chicks to feed. We're going to find a lot more of these unpleasant surprises in our news inboxes over the coming weeks and months. The only way around them is for those who gain enormous benefits from open source code to give something back in terms of development effort. You dog, you cat, and you pig — get stuck in — because the Little Red Hen is no dummy, and she's tired of being taken advantage of.

That's why proprietary software was invented.  That way, you don't have to worry about all those "freeloaders."  Homie gets paid for his hard work as users pass some of their utility benefits to the persons who made the software.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, proprietary software is a GREAT business model, and deals better when self-interested humans do what self-interested humans do...which is prioritize their own needs first.  That doesn't mean that open source isn't important.  It just means that all this "proprietary software is evil" talk is silly.