Response to John Naughon@The Observer re: Bill Gates jumbo-size problem

On Sunday May 7, 2006, John Naughon of The Observer wrote a piece titled A problem too jumbo-sized for Bill Gates to solve?. In general, this was quite positive towards open source software, however there were a few points where John didn't fully appreciate or understand the the key differences between the Microsoft approach towards developing software, and the open source approach. What follows is an email I sent to John clarifying a few of these differences.

Let me give you an analogy. Microsoft has the money to build monster trucks, with rocket packs. These vehicles can simply power through the problem of vehicular wind resistance at speed. Open source generally cannot afford this, so we end up designing sleeker vehicles which slice through the problem of wind resistance. The advantage of the latter approach is that as speeds increase, our approach offers the better chance of long term success.

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