Marking the start of the year with one of the dumber analogies in quite some time, Phil Haack has a post about betrayal, open-source software, yada yada yada. It’s mostly rather silly and you can read it here.
Within it, Haack implies that the sort of progress that Microsoft is showing by open sourcing more and more of its stuff is equivalent to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and other things:
The Catholic Church at the time must have felt betrayed by Galileo when he lent his support to the heliocentric model of the universe because it deviated from their orthodoxy.
Factory owners who profited on cheap labor from children must have felt betrayed by the passage of child labor laws.
Racists who held onto the idea that other races were inferior to their own must have felt betrayed by the passage of the civil rights act.
Perhaps sensing how incredibly stupid this is, he immediately tries to weasel:
These are grand examples. But often we experience much smaller and simpler betrayals as a result of little tiny foot steps of progress. Such as the betrayal some might feel when changing winds in the industry makes their antiquated business practices harder to sustain.
Regardless of how one feels about open source software (for the record, as of this moment, I don’t care one way or another about it, but certainly use it along with closed source software, and while using it, I neither feel dirty nor morally superior), this really is just idiotic (not to mention it takes the comment he is commenting on totally out of context).
But, there you go. The year is off to a rousing start.