[Klaus]

 

Vendors enjoy some form of lock-in. That's why only an open source group would have the idealistic push to do an open platform.

 

Actually I am also a software engineer in my other life. And I think that open source is the most ridiculous movement ever.

Open source as mechanism for industry-wide collaboration - yes. But open source products (Linux, Tomcat, Eclipse, etc) are completely insane. I am amazed that grown up people waste their time to code for free. No other discipline does that.  And even worse - because everything is seemingly free, it destroys businesses and as such jobs. The common perception is already that software has a low value. Fortunately this era is coming to an end soon - cloud services are closed source thus finally we are moving towards a market that is driven by performance rather than the absence of a price tag.