Ford wrote:
Being an opensource fanboy isn't quite that bad. Here's a great example of why. In the programming field, you go out and get your degree, and you think to yourself that this degree is going to get you the kind of job you want. You spend $40,000.00+ getting your education in the hopes that you may be able to $40,000.00+ a year. Once you graduate, you find out that this simply isn't true. In reality, you are never going to make it into the programming field, and will instead work a low paying job somewhere in IT making half of what you thought you would. Why? Because no company will hire you until you have experience, but to have experience you must get work somewhere. With open source software, you have that. You can bolster your resume, and use that to get a job somewhere in the software field. So, is open source really all that bad when it can lead to people who contribute to our economy, pay their taxes, and eventually out-grow their ideological dogmatism?
Remember, too, that not all free software advocates do have that "dogmatism"—F/OSS has many virtues, and a few drawbacks, but not all people are blind to those drawbacks. I work in a commercial organisation writing software. Most of it is closed source; I do get to open source anything my boss thinks would be helpful to the wider programming community at large (and which isn't proprietary to us). In my free time, I write open source. It works for me.