Unintentional Humor

This is funny:

Open source will fail to deliver innovation and is more likely to break applications, according to Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group at SAP.
“We all talk about how great Linux is,” he said at a speaking engagement at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.

“But if you look at the most innovative desktop today, Microsoft’s Vista is not copying Linux, it is copying Apple.”

And Apple’s Mac OS X, of course, is based entirely on proprietary, commercial software. It doesn’t have a Unix-based open source core, an open-source web server, a web browser based on the source code of a web browser originally developed for Linux, Samba, an open-source package that allows file and printer sharing with Windows, CUPS, an open-source project that handles Mac OS X printing, and… well, I could go on like this for pages.

Mac OS X is a bundle of features, some of which are open source and some of which are proprietary. Arguably, most of the features that Microsoft is copying are proprietary, but to a large extent, the reason Apple has been able to develop so many innovative features so quickly is that they built the OS on a rock-solid open source foundation, saving them a lot of work in re-implementing a whole bunch of wheels. It’s downright absurd to argue that Mac OS X is a poster child for the superiority of proprietary software over open source software. What Apple demonstrates is that both proprietary and free software can benefit from collaboration.

I also think it’s a mistake to assume that the desktop is the be-all and end-all of the software market. Open source software isn’t that great at producing high-quality desktop software (Firefox is a major exception) because, frankly, desktop software is boring to create. In contrast, open source software is thriving in behind-the-scenes roles like web, file, and email servers which, while not as visible to the average user, is every bit as important economically.

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