> They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).
> As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.
Uhm. So many free software projects work like that. A company creates something, releases it as free software. Yes, people contribute (and that's awesome by the way) but in general all of the engineering talent works at the company because they wrote it in the first place (and they hire contributors). At SUSE this is how YaST, zypper, spacewalk, et al development works (with significant contributions from the openSUSE community, but we have teams of people working on those projects so our contributions are more of a concentrated effort). There's nothing new or different about this model of free software development (Sun did the same thing with OpenSolaris and Joyent does the same thing with SmartOS). Yes, GNU and Linux follow the hobbyist model but that's not how all projects work.
> As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.
Uhm. So many free software projects work like that. A company creates something, releases it as free software. Yes, people contribute (and that's awesome by the way) but in general all of the engineering talent works at the company because they wrote it in the first place (and they hire contributors). At SUSE this is how YaST, zypper, spacewalk, et al development works (with significant contributions from the openSUSE community, but we have teams of people working on those projects so our contributions are more of a concentrated effort). There's nothing new or different about this model of free software development (Sun did the same thing with OpenSolaris and Joyent does the same thing with SmartOS). Yes, GNU and Linux follow the hobbyist model but that's not how all projects work.