Saturday, August 3, 2002

Meta, and My Open Source Convictions

gary comments on the fact that the MT people spoke at OSCON last week.

i'll concede that since the convention is supposed to be concerned with open source software, and as such, MT probably should not have been represented, since it is most certainly not open source.

his comments about people using MT instead of some open source blogging tool made me think though. i'm certainly one of the people he's talking about, as i use MT to maintain this site, and if i was using some other blogging tool i might be inclined to contribute code to it.

on one hand, maybe this does 'make the world a worse place', or at least 'not a better place', in some abstract sense, but on the other, i'm not sure that i care.

it's like something louis told me once... he said that he felt he had 'done his part for king and country', and as such didn't feel guilty going out and using some closed source product if it made his life easier.

while i don't pretend to be as accomplished an open source hacker as he is, i still feel that i have made (and continue to make) my own contributions, and quite honestly, when you get right down to it, i'm not all that interested in hacking on a blogging tool. for the moment, MT does all that i desire of it, and perhaps someday, if something else better comes along, i might switch to it. that something might be open source, might be 'source available' like MT, or it might even (doubtful as it seems) be closed source.

when it comes to computers, i use what gets the job done, and while i'd prefer (for mostly technical reasons) that it be something i can hack on freely, that just isn't the sole motivating factor, and i'm ok with that.