I disagree with this article deeply. He puts forward not a single example to prove his point. And there are many counterexamples. Just look at the FPGA tooling. By the articles logic it should essentially be the garden of eden of Software. But look at the actual state. It's a rotten swamp with almost 0 real innovation in the last decades.
The open source tooling that has started up in the last 3 years is already more usable and ergonomic then the proprietary tooling.
Does calling open source maintainers autists not go against the very codes of conduct he seems to support?
That's not even getting into the complete misunderstanding of what open source is and the motivation of contributors and maintainers (nerd cred? Can one be any more condescending...)
This was so awful I unfollowed the author's RSS feed after following it for his experimental project years ago. Which was closed source and appears to have never released anything.
I know plenty of closed-source tools that provide their authors significant income while benefiting from a healthy relationship with open source. Pico-8, which has a strong community of people who share game code, and Prodigy, which closely integrates with the open-source spaCy, both come to mind.
The spaCy developers' piece on running an open source business from 2017 is a much better approach to the topic.
I applaud the author for making it obvious that he has nothing of value to add to the conversation. Too often, idiocy is hidden between the lines; it's refreshing to see it put forth as the leading banner.
The open source tooling that has started up in the last 3 years is already more usable and ergonomic then the proprietary tooling.