Although I agree, kinda. We are wrong.
The market cap of Red Hat is 6.06B
The market cap of Oracle is 119.57B
Oracle doesn't need "a community" in any way. Communities are great if the bottom line isn't the priority. RHAT makes the bottom like "a" priority but they are certainly not making it "the" priority. They can't because they are an Open Source company and without the community they are hosed. Oracle needs a community like Bill Gates needs a loan.
We (the U.S.) is a great deal larger and more spread out than *any* of those other countries. However, it is ridiculous that I can't easily get 100Mbs (compared to other countries) in cities like Portland or Seattle. I would expect to only be able to get 25Mbs where I live (and I can and do), as I am 45 from a major metro.
To bite America's shiny metal ass?
No, to be clear. Dollar for dollar I can find competent open source staff offshore in a much easier fashion than in the states. The key is to balance to two.
I see your point with something like Linux engineers but that isn't the part of open source I am in.
It is actually not tough to find offshore open source qualified expertise. You just have to be willing to dig a little deeper than freelance.com
I run a small company. The reality is, off shoring especially with the Open Source market makes entirely too much sense from a business perspective. I can have 4 United States based people, and another 12 strategically located throughout the world. The cost of the 4 is the same as the 12. It is better for my customers, and frankly my pocket book. Also, to be honest Open Source expertise is easier to obtain off american shores.
The downside to the largest economy in the world is that it is also ridiculously expensive. Of course not as bad as western Europe but still...
Actually you are wrong.
The foundation of the populist Internet is:
NCSA/Apache.
Perl
Sendmail
Which has morphed into:
Apache
PHP
Java
Perl
Python
Postfix
None of which are PHP.
The closest you can get in your argument is that GCC is GPL but even that falls down because the fact that GCC is GPL is irrelevant. It is glibc that matters and it is LGPL.
The Internet was built on a foundation of interoperability. Which means open and closed source.
PostgreSQL has had Windows support for 5 years (4 years?). It has been what I would call reasonable for 3 of those and good for 18 months.
People in the Open Source community have been warning against this for years with MySQL. It is one of the key tenets in the PostgreSQL vs MySQL playbook. Use PostgreSQL because no single company controls the source. It can't be bought. MySQL dug its own destiny by tying its hand into the GPL AND (note the AND) being owned by a single entity.
HOLY MACRO!