How do you choose a restaurant? A “proprietary” restaurant would be a restaurant who won’t give me the recipe for the food I’m eating. An “open source” restaurant would. Which would you rather eat at? The restaurant that tells you what you’re eating, or the one with the secret ingredient?

Now, how about eating at home? If I’m to prepare my own food at home, I should have the right to the recipe for the meal, and prepare it as I wish. I can still choose the “proprietary” pre-made foods, such as frozen foods, or those from the deli, or I can get the “source code” recipe, and make my own.

So, to me, it’s not inconsistent at all. A service is a restaurant I choose to eat at, while software is eating my own meal at home.

Now, again I ask: which would you rather eat at, when an option exists? Joe Brown steakhouse which does NOT tell you the recipe to the food you’re eating, or Sally Smith steak house that does?

That’s all.

Your blog post was titled “I Don’t Do Proprietary And I Don’t Tweet- I Dent” – this clearly states that you consider Twitter a proprietary service, as such it seems reason that you consider closed source websites with closed data also proprietary. Whether there is a free alternative or not has nothing to do with it: it still means those apps are proprietary.

Do we have any examples of groundbreaking, webservices that started out as open services where there is no dominant competitor in that service space yet? That’s the watershed moment as open development advocates that we need to try to reach and then hold up for others to follow.
identi.ca isn’t that.

Ninjam for collaborative real-time music performance might be that sort of watershed service.

http://www.masternewmedia.org/music_collaboration/music_jamming/online_music_collaboration_software_20050715.htm

http://www.ninjam.com/download.php

I have a sneaky suspicion that a certain Mr. Bacon might find that sort of open collaborative service that ninjam is trying to provide to be the sort of thing he would be drawn to and could personally champion.

-jef

However, surely when there is a Free service that arrives, it is superior to their proprietary cousins, and the better choice?

Lastly, I agree with the point of your post. I wasn’t picking on you, as much as extending your argument: those who chose proprietary software are choosing to enslave themselves in their manacles. I made that clear with the quote from ESR.

I appreciate what you’re saying here. However your last post, as has been noted, was all about using proprietary services.

The point of my post is that F/OSS is the best choice when it does what you need and want it to do. However there are cases where arguments can be made to use proprietary. Your argument was to compromise for those in your circle that will not embrace the Free services you prefer.

In the case of identi.ca you can do something interesting. You can live your freedom and reach out to your friends in the shackles. Follow your subscribed people via your RSS reader. As your friends become more enlightened, your RSS reader gets less of a workout.

My post was wondering why those who embrace Freedom chose the shackles when an option at least equal to their needs is there.

Now the above statement may not be legitimate in a conversation about twitter vs identi.ca but the point still stands. If you never use proprietary software, you’ll never know what your missing (if anything).

For me, this is the difference between being “pro open-source” and “anti-proprietary software”. The best quality software gets my vote and if that software happens to be proprietary I use it without guilt until there is a suitable/comparable open alternative.