After Gosling, here’s another outsider who seems to have a strange opinion of Open Source communities:
IT giants accused of exploiting open source: ZDNet Australia: News: Software: “‘Open source communities need to take themselves seriously and realise they have contribution to themselves and society. From the moment they realise they are part of the evolution of society and try to influence it, we will be moving in the right direction,’ said Villasante.”
And again:
“Open source is a complete mess — many people do lots of different things. There’s total confusion today,” Villasante said.
What a load of crap! If there is one force that is trying hard to shape the IT landscape — and parts of society — today in ways that nobody could have foreseen only a few years ago, that’s Open Source. Not just Open Source software, but also “open-source-like” initiatives like Creative Commons, Wikipedia, podcasting, you name it.
If there’s a critique to be moved to OS developers, is that sometimes they take themselves too seriously and seem intent on conquering the world with their peculiar point of view.
As for “confusion”, we prefer to call it “freedom”.
This echoes what Gosling said some time ago and which I criticized here and here. To James’ credit, he now claims that he’s being misunderstood. So it might as well been that the ZDNet reporter misunderstood Villasante too.
Curiously, two out of three of the reports quoted here come from Australia. Can it be the case that the perspective from down under is a little bit reversed? 
