The perils of mixing open source and money
<i>It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem.</i><p>I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying this.<p>The open source projects that are popular like Linux, nginx, and other system ops stuff are obviously popular and have benefited immensely from indirect money (in terms of institutional support). They are vastly superior compared to anything a company could built closed source. We often cling to the idea that open source software is superior to closed source software, but a quick survey of the landscape of open source software will show that this is patently false. Where there is obvious demand for a software product that lots of interested parties need just to maintain operability, the open source solution will usually be vastly superior if not mildly better.<p>But, take a look at the vast amount of software that is created on github that is open source and you will see a lot of (self-admitted) crap (I have made a lot of self-admitted crap). This crap might have the kernel of a good idea in it, but it never got the time it needed. I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.<p>David, not all of us get to be part of incredibly profitable companies that can afford to fund our adventures in coding. Suggesting that Rails hasn't benefited from institutional support and money is just deceptive and something I can't stomach. It's something we can't measure, but that doesn't mean it's not there.