But hey, competition is awesome, amiright?
Competition sucks, but it's the best we have. Even Socialists recognized the need for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_competition
You are wrong, and here is why. You dont need to be able to modify the source yourself in order to benefit from it. There are these things called markets, you see. Free software enables a free market, without artificial barriers to entry, and you dont need to be able to make customisations personally to benefit from this.
What are the artificial barriers to entry?
I don't see where anyone has given serious thought to the harmful effects of open source software. In the free market, one of the assumptions is that I will be compensated based purely based on supply and demand of my commercial software product.
And (or "but", depending on your perspective) to encourage innovation, I'm also are granted the right to a short-term monopoly in the form of patents and copyrights. This keeps competitors from gaining a foothold and allows me to grow my work into something that's extremely useful and keeps people employed.
What's left unsaid is this: Any significant piece of machinery requires a significant effort in reverse engineering; at least if somebody hopes to produce a competing version. Why should software be any different? The efforts involved keeps half-hearted attempts from gaining any sort of foothold. This effort in turn keeps the market spared from having dozens of spectacularly inferior products.
And what is a commercial "software product"? Until we make bugfree software on platforms that never change, it's not just the compiled product but also the services involved (bug fixes, feature requests, upgrade paths, etc.). By making software OSS, you've unnecessarily made the barrier of entry unnaturally easy since you're only relying on legal protection to keep the competition at bay.
genetically less apt is probably a bad turn of phrase. they can do it they just find it less interesting.
Awkward phrasing. But he said "genetically less apt to LIKE..." (emphasis mine), which I think the jury is still out on.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn