[Xiph-Advocacy] Re: [Speex-dev] Microsoft RTAudio

[Aaron Whitehouse]

> > The little dirty secret that nobody dares talk about is that
> > the open source religion was born out of anti-Microsoft,
> > anti-Capitalist attitudes ... let's simply acknowledge the truth.

> I will point out Microsoft has/does ship several of our codecs, [...]

Just to batter the other side of that point, our codecs are installed
in games because it makes economic sense, not through some socialist
ideology.

We push to get users to communicate with vendors to make vendors see
Ogg support as a value-added attribute. Then, their cost-benefit
analyses will make supporting Ogg worthwhile.

I would use Theora/Vorbis to stream video in my business because I
don't need to purchase a copy of Microsoft products and this saves me
money.

Just because some people view capitalism as exploiting others for the
sake of personal greed, doesn't make open source "anti-capitalistic"
because it doesn't conform to that stereotype. It is precisely because
open source makes capitalistic sense that it is so incredibly
successful. Motorola isn't basing its new phones on Linux because it
disagrees with the fundamental principles of the free market, but
because the free market makes it a good idea.

Some of open source's biggest benefactors are corporations (Google,
IBM etc.) or people who have succeeded in capitalistic terms (Mark
Shuttleworth).

There are numerous good articles on the economics of open source, if
you look for them.

There are anti-capitalistic open source advocates, but to say that
open source is anti-capitalistic by nature alienates a large number of
the other advocates, users and developers.

I'm not having a go, I'm making sure that the myth isn't propagated
any further among those who casually visit the archives.

Regards,

Aaron