The event which persuaded me that open source software was the pragmatic choice happened in 1999 (though it took a few years afterwards for me to articulate my

The event which persuaded me that open source software was the pragmatic choice happened in 1999 (though it took a few years afterwards for me to articulate my advocacy in those terms). That's when the Gibson Guitars, having acquired Opcode Systems previously, abandoned development on Opcode's flagship sequencer application, Studio Vision — leaving its users high and dry. Many music users today are locked into proprietary applications analogous to Studio Vision and their proprietary formats. If the company goes under, or if management decides to kill the product, there goes all your work. Theoretically proprietary software can support open file formats — but there are such strong incentives for companies to leverage network effects and lock in users that at any moment you are one upgrade away from a policy change and silent conversion of your document to a proprietary format. Only FOSS guarantees that your documents will survive the tumult of capitalism. Two decades later, history has repeated itself, with Flash, Macromedia, and Adobe in the roles previously played by Studio Vision, Opcode, and Gibson...