FOSS isn't always the answer

...Over the years, I've become less patient with the stridency of the FOSS movement, or at least some of the more pedantic wings of it. It is certainly not my place to tell anyone that they should buy or not buy any kind of software. However, the repeated assertions by members of the FOSS movement that proprietary software is somehow dirty or a corruption of principles has begun to stick in my craw.

There are plenty of places where FOSS makes all the sense in the world, and those are the places that FOSS has succeeded. No one uses a closed source compiler anymore, Eclipse is one of the leading IDEs for many languages, and Linux is a dominant player in embedded operating systems. All these cases succeeded because, largely, the software is secondary to the main business of the companies using it (the major exception being Linux vendors who contribute to the kernel, but they have a fairly unique business model.)

Where FOSS breaks down pretty quickly is when the software is not a widely desired tool used by the developer community. Much as you can quickly get to the Wikipedia philosophy page by repeated clicking on the first link of articles, you can quickly get to the requirement for a utopian society once you start following the line of assumptions needed to make consumer-level FOSS work....