On dead fish, Thomas tells a story where Joseph Pelrine (who I understand is a fantastic coach of Scrum (development)) compared doing open source to having an affair...

... and I'm going "say what?????"

'cause I actually feel a bit insulted by the comparison, and it really does imply a kind of thinking that could be said in just a few words: "All your brain are belong to us!" (said with an ominous voice). It also implies that a company I work for has anything to do with my free time.

Mind you, I've always made it clear to anyone I've worked for that I do work with open source on my free time, and it has never been a problem, some have even encouraged me to do so on work time, for the simple reason that their benefit was greater than without it (one company was making a piece of software that was based on OpenSSL, on which I worked quite a lot at the time).

In his blog entry, Thomas gives quite a lot of good reasons why working on open source is a good thing, not just for him personally, but also for whoever he works for, in terms of knowledge he brings in to the company and the connections he makes. To that, I'll add a larger view, which is the greater good, where knowledge comes to people in a way that would be difficult otherwise. There are a lot of good programmers out there who have had a lot of training through open source, training that they would perhaps not have had otherwise. And finally, wide spread knowledge as well as all kinds of connections between people bring forward the development of humankind.

Having this reduced to an affair... I lack more words on the matter...

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