The Computing, GIS and Archeology in the UK blog had a post last week entitled Why I Love Open Source. It recounts a pleasant interaction that they had with an open source developer, culminating in a quick fix/enhancement to the software. Good for them, and good for the developer. (Aside: the software is not cost-free for non-commercial usage, but is still free-as-in-speech. At least it says it is open source, and source is provided, but there is no specific licence mentioned that I could find.)

I don’t want to come over all Dimitri but this single anecdote (and remember, the plural of anecdote is not data as someone much smarter than me once said) is being extrapolated into an open-source-good-closed-source-bad thesis. Harrumph. At no stage were any of the four freedoms of open source software exercised. There seems to be nothing open source-specific at all about this case, just a nice relationship between provider and consumer.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but we at Cadcorp make hotfixes/patches/enhancements/call-them-what-you-will available all the time. So please do not tar everyone with the same big-bad-closed-source brush or you might end up, bizarrely, actually complaining about getting bugfixes.