Bob Metcalfe re-evaluates open source

Bob Metcalfe may not have invented the Internet, but few people's technical achievements have done more to make it popular and accessible than the father of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. Metcalfe and the Open Source community got a little bit sideways with each other last century, but that appears to be all in the past now. Having compared the Open Source community with Communism and Linus Torvalds with Stalin, Metcalfe did not make himself all too popular within the Open Source community and has been the target of more than many attacks from it. But all this hasn't make him refrain from re-evaluating his stand and he is not only talking the talk but also walking the walk. Metcalfe now is the director of Sicortex, a provider of open source Linux/MPI scientific high-performance cluster supercomputers.

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Of course, we are happy to see that such prominent people and Open Source non-believers are adapting their views according to what the market had been going through the past decade. Open Source had become so much more than a community of hobbyists finding a way to get their code out in the open. We would also like to remark on the comparison with communism, which is still made all too often nowadays. Remember that everyone owns their own copy of their Open Source product. In communism, nobody owns anything, as the state is the only entity entitled to property. In fact, this reminds us of the way proprietary licenses are built up. You can never actually own your copy of a proprietary product. You may only use it under certain (and often harsh) restrictions...