Copy Source Or Open Source?

Do not let the title fool you. I happen to be both a big fan of and in a few cases, a financial contributor to select open source projects. Safe to say, I pay for what I use. All of that out of the way, this article I found today is calling into question the innovativeness of open source software as a whole.

Clearly, the person who wrote the article is failing to realize the POINT of open source software. It is not about creating something new, unlike what can be found elsewhere in the proprietary market place. It is about making software available, the source code for said software available and doing so without restricting the freedoms of the affected users.

But yes, it is accurate to say that Songbird, Open Office and others have taken what has worked from the proprietary world and placed those concepts into the open source community. Does this even matter? No, as the software is not offered for financial gain. Rather in these instances, it is offered as a service to the community it is serving. And it is doing so with code that is open, available for inspection and without the ever-fun, vendor lock-in.