Frater 219's Journal: You might be a closed-source twerp if ...

You might be a closed-source twerp if ...

• You've chosen a piece of software not for its features or benefits but because it is not open source.
• Despite the numerous copyright- and patent-violation lawsuits that have been filed, adjudicated, and settled against Microsoft, you think it's more likely that Linux contains "stolen intellectual property" than that Windows does.
• When someone in your organization proposes use of an open-source product, you've retorted, "Not everything has to be open source!"
• You refer to a reasoned preference for open source software as a "bias" or "religion".
• Despite the existence of Red Hat, Digium, MySQL AB, Zope Inc., and other open-source companies, you believe that open source software is "non-commercial" or "anti-corporate".
• You have referred to open source software as "communist".
• You have referred to Eric S. Raymond as a "socialist".
• You have conflated open-source licenses with "the public domain", or claimed that open-source software is "not copyrighted".
• You take Laura DiDio or Rob Enderle seriously.
• You crack BSD/LSD jokes to imply that Unix or open-source programmers are insane or unreliable.
• You believe that Linux or Unix cannot be used "on the desktop", but you have never tried it or asked anyone who does it about their experience.
• When someone points out that Mac OS X is a desktop Unix system, you retort that it isn't "really" Unix -- despite the C shell, POSIX compliance, BSD kernel, X11 ....
• You think that software users should bear liability for copyright infringement committed by software publishers, thus necessitating "indemnification" -- even though you would never claim that readers of the New York Times would be liable for a plagiarism committed by a Times reporter.
• You think that Linux, in its present form, was cooked up by some college student in a basement.
• You think that Linux, since it is based on the design of Unix, is "30-year-old technology" and therefore inferior -- as if software designs were to be judged on their novelty rather than their reliability.
• Despite the number of Linux systems that Dell, HP, IBM, and other major vendors ship to large corporations and other institutions, you believe that "Linux is not ready for the enterprise".
• You note that only a small fraction of the computers in the world run Linux or BSD, and conclude that open-source software is of little consequence -- selectively ignoring the fact that 60+% of all Web servers in the world run the open-source Apache software.
• You think that open-source software is likely to contain Trojan horses, because anyone can modify it.
• Although you know that The SCO Group's legal arguments are unfounded and that they have presented no evidence of their claims, you hope that they will win anyhow, to show those irritating open-source upstarts that business should be about power rather than mutual benefit.
• You think that Sun Java Desktop is a Java-based product, not a Linux distribution.
• You think that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is an end-user license agreement, or that using GPLed software involves giving up rights you would otherwise have.
• You think that open-source projects are each the work of an individual volunteer programmer, so that when the one programmer responsible for Linux or PostgreSQL or Apache gets bored with it, there will be no more support available.
• A security vulnerability in mySQL is a "Linux security hole", but a security vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server is not a "Windows security hole". That is, the fact that Linux distributors ship more third-party software should be considered a problem, not a virtue.

Excellent list

[Feztaa]

Made only better by the fact that DiDio and Enderle have such easily-mockable names: Laura DiDiot and Rob Pretenderle.