Hugh Macleod recently asked "How Well Does Open Source Currently Meet The Needs of Shareholders and CEO's?" It's an illogical, inconsistent post that should have scrolled out of the memory of mankind, but somehow it has been mentioned far and wide, including a mention on the popular Coding Horror, among other highly ranked blogs, many of which just muddied the waters of this misleading question even worse.

The original post by Hugh was baffling, first confusing the Microsoft Partner program with gross Microsoft sales, and then completely hodge-podging software as a commercial product with software as a consumable.

There aren't any open source billionaires selling software as a product, Hugh tells us, so therefore open source doesn't service shareholders and CEO's (of non software-as-a-product organizations) as a consumable.

Huh?

Hugh isn't even commenting on the financial viability of building a software as a product company around open source, where such a question merits sober consideration (though there are quite a few very successful open source businesses, whether a company can survive and thrive with their crown jewels open sourced needs to be considered on a case by case basis). Instead he's claiming that every organization needs to ensure that their suppliers are making boatloads of loot (preferrably suppliers with an ownership structure that centralizes it on one or two individuals), which is a rather odd consideration. Or worse, that their suppliers share some nonsensical correlation with someone else that is very successful.

Open source is a very contentious topic, and to many it is threatening to their world. It is often grossly oversold as a silver-bullet, when often it only plays a marginal part (both Firefox and MySQL, as examples, are overwhelmingly developed by a traditional team in a traditional way, and the source just happens to be available. It really isn't the driving force of their march forward).

Yet to correlate software as a consumable so arbitrarily holds no value whatsoever, and isn't a good foundation for any discussion.

And most remarkably it uses Bill Gates as the example of the merit of non-open source software as a consumable -- yet Bill Gates is perversely probably the single biggest reason the open source market is so vibrant and alive. The anti-Microsoft rallying cry was a critical early factor in the growth of the OSS community.