He conveniently forgot to mention that most (if not all) "open source companies" do not pay their programmers to write open sourced code. Most of them simply ta

He conveniently forgot to mention that most (if not all) "open source companies" do not pay their programmers to write open sourced code. Most of them simply take what's been done by others, repackage and then "sell as a service" essentially profiting on someone else's sweat. Periodically these companies feel a bit guilty and find ways to contribute back, usually in very insignificant ways, but most are just parasites. Google, Yahoo and most other "OSS-friendly" companies built their stuff on top of mountains of open sourced code that they had no chance of re-creating commercially, yet only tiny, truly negligible percent of their own code is available for others to use and benefit from. In that regard you have to respect Microsoft, whose programmers essentially coded their way from the bottom (at company's expense): from boot loaders to OS and compilers and hardware drivers - they've done it all. Yes, the Future is to have all the programmers sit at home and build products for free, and then take it and make money on "service and contracts". Why the hell not, especially for Sun, who's never been successful in commercial software business and has always looked at software only as a free commodity that helps to sell their expensive servers. I'd love to see how these OSS-friends would react if GPL required them to publish code of everything they use it for, not just the products they allow customers to copy. Heck, I'd love to hack around with original BigTable and MapReduce code, I am sure GCC/Linux hackers would do too. I see the very same attitude here on YC.news, when every 18 year old with a weekend project is looking for VC funding and educating himself on business plans as opposed to just simply posting it to sourceforge, just like programmers, whose libraries represent 99% of his codebase, have done.