That certainly seems like an interesting system, and at the moment I'm open to ideas, although it's essentially impossible that my country will adopt a new system.
I think I fully agree, although to expound on (1) I don't think that is the kind of software that any company should want to depend on for anything remotely important. I'm sure there are counter examples where you get a high quality project that doesn't require or accept donations, but I think these will be exceedingly few and far between. It seems like it's in the company's best interest to make sure the development for a dependency isn't going to go away for lack of funding?
I'm of the opinion that large companies should be paying for the software they use regardless of whether it's open source or not, because software isn't free to develop. So assuming you're paying for the software you use, you still have the problem that you are subject to your internal procurement processes. If your internal procurement processes make it really painful to add a new seat, then maybe the processes need to be reformed. Open source only "fixes" the problem insofar as there's no enforcement mechanism, so it makes it really easy for companies to stiff the open source contributors.
I don't think this is entirely true. A system of government could dramatically limit the power of the executive or make it easier to remove a president or make it harder for the legislature to make moves (essentially just limit the damage until the cult effect wears off).
These are strawmen arguments. No one is arguing that libraries matter more than organizations/teams, and no one is arguing that it's impossible to build good/bad frameworks in any given language/framework/etc. You can (and should!) solve the problems with your teams and your tools. If you pick a tool that solves problems you don't have (probably because it's new and shiny), there are probably hidden costs that you didn't consider and you're probably going to slow your team down. How much that slow down is going to affect your project depends on how significant the slow-down is and how sensitive your project is to developer productivity (the widely used internal tool with the big budget at BIG CORP is probably safe, but the team at the small startup with the shoestring budget and fierce competition is going to feel that friction in a bad way.
Right, but will they be able to say that the customer was thrilled with their rewrite? Probably not; they're already mostly happy with the simpler site and now they've paid to make things (almost certainly) more complex than they need to be. They probably feel swindled into agreeing to a rewrite of something that was mostly working but The Next Developer told them that adding that new feature would require completely rewriting the front- and backends.
I’m not familiar with Popper’s work, but I see that quote (“tolerate everything but intolerance”) used to rationalize intolerance toward perfectly tolerant individuals. Any evidence that the target is “intolerant” suffices, no matter how tenuous or contrived (“an intolerant person once said a good thing about <target> therefore <target> is intolerant). This seems similar to the concern you expressed about the GP’s philosophy. Did Popper lay out more stringent criteria for what constitutes “tolerance” and “intolerance”?
> Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer.
How are FB and Twitter comparable to RSS? And how are they trying to kill it? Like they're not supporting it on their platform? If so, why should I care? Or do you mean "they're conspiring to kill it across the Internet", in which case please elaborate.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted; I can only assume people are interpreting my comment as vouching for FB/Twitter, which couldn't be further from the truth. I can be (and am) confused by his wording without supporting big social media companies. :)
Not joking. It's unreasonable to conclude any sort of discrimination based on a single sample, but if I had to guess a malicious motive, I would pick anti-young-male sentiment over racism. This is probably not very satisfying if you came for a witch hunt.
Discrimination in business is likely predicated on the belief that people of group X are more likely to damage your property than people of group Y, and that the risk is great enough to avoid doing business with group X altogether, even though it means a smaller pool of potential tenants/customers.
> Is it discriminatory for colleges to not group men/women together in dorm room?
No, but that's not relevant. The correct analogy would be "Is it discriminatory for colleges to refuse residence to one gender?" That said, I respect the right of anyone to choose who they let into their home, even if I might disagree with the criteria.