> Nowadays there’s no other realistic economic choice than to do your thing on top of the best open source stuff you can find, even if it’s not quite appropriat

> Nowadays there’s no other realistic economic choice than to do your thing on top of the best open source stuff you can find, even if it’s not quite appropriate What is your take on free software / open source in this regard? I'll lay out my own bias. I think that the biggest qualitative inventions in computing occurred largely in places that had a well funded basic research culture whose goals were vague and allowed for a lot of play without managerial meddling. These places were on the 5-10 year timeline, some of them were government funded or aided, and there are far fewer of them today. We have no equivalent of ARPA, no Bell Labs, no PARC, and, well, even though Apple is the biggest company in the world, I doubt they'd come up with Hypercard today. Open source and free software represent disparate, poorly funded activity, which is why most of what gets produced is innovations atop some of the ideas from 40 years ago. Younger generations of developers are likely to believe that Unix/Linux is everywhere because they are technically the best systems possible, not because it Unix was a well designed system for minicomputers in the 70s that was distributed for free with source, and also what became the basis for GNU etc. I don't see a way out of this pattern, really.