[ardour-dev] nice quote from a premium salon.com article

[Paul Davis]

(i got a free day pass to read it)
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"There's this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source
world," Lanier said. "So what do they make -- another version of
Unix?"
 

Jef Raskin jumped in. "And what do they put on top of it? Another Windows!"

"What are they thinking?" Lanier continued. "Why is the idealism just
about how the code is shared -- what about idealism about the code
itself?"

At this point, Andy Hertzfeld, who has devoted himself in recent years
to open-source projects like Eazel and Chandler, spoke up for the
maligned legions of Linux-heads. "It's because they want people to use
the stuff!"

His comment underscored something that's frequently misunderstood
about the open-source approach, which is often wrongly stereotyped as
loopily communal and out-of-touch with business reality. There's an
essential pragmatism to the notion that programmers work best when
they can share, and learn from, one another's work. After all, every
other field of human endeavor works that way.

Bricklin sent waves of laughter through the auditorium by reading a
passage from Lammers' interview with Bill Gates in which the young
Microsoft founder explained that his work on different versions of
Microsoft's BASIC compiler was shaped by looking at how other
programmers had gone about the same task. Gates went on to say that
young programmers don't need computer science degrees: "The best way
to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that
other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at
the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their
operating systems."

Bricklin finished reading Gates' words and announced, with an impish
smile, "This is where Gates and [Richard] Stallman agree!"