I'm starting to think that I'm the only cynic when it comes to Paul Graham. Here's Doc, extolling the virtues of what Graham had to say at OSCon. Here's the thing that rankled me:

Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.

Hey Paul - here's a huge cluestick - there are people out there, working for commercial companies that charge for their products who enjoy what they do. Hell, some of us love what we do.

I'm not hostile to Open Source; heck, BottomFeeder is Open Source, freely available for download. But let's not kid ourselves - I'm not altruistic about it, and neither are most developers. My purpose is pretty clear - I'm promoting Cincom Smalltalk, and I'm hoping to encourage people to buy it. What about the large open source efforts? The successful ones (Eclipse and Apache come to mind, as does Linux in general) are all funded. Usually by large companies. In particular, IBM. Is that evil? Heck no, but it's not altruistic either. Without that funding, OSS would be an irrelevancy in this industry.

So why does it get funded? Well, that's no mystery either. IBM in particular needed a weapon to use as an end run around Microsoft, because MS spent the decade between 1985-1995 out-maneuvering IBM at every turn. OSS was the perfect thing, because it made IBM "the good guy", and it gave them a loss leader (on which they don't have to lose all the money) on which to build.

What I dislike about Graham's pronouncements is their assumption of virtue around free software, and the consequent assumption that commercial software is somehow "dirty". Here's the thing - developers need to be paid. That pay has to come from somewhere. The only difference between a vendor that charges for licenses and one that charges for "service and support" is that the latter is using the currently fashionable OSS play in order to appear virtuous. You have to pay the developers either way.

Graham also misses a few things about the industry. Take this, for instance:

That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser.

It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.

Umm, here's the thing Paul - until a few months ago, MS wasn't trying. At all. They spent the last five years assuming that the browser wars were over, because they had killed Netscape. And heck, they nearly had. The team that decided to carry the code forward only got into a competitive situation about 18 months ago, because they pretty much torched the original codebase and started over. Cast your mind back to 1997 - IE usage had grown, mostly because they had a better browser. Remember, if you will, Netscape 4.x. There were very few people who thought it was better than the IE of the time.

MS seems to be trying with IE again. I'm skeptical after the last few years, but I remember the Netscape/IE roller coaster well enough to not count them out.