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Thursday, October 21, 2010

Amateur's and Open Source

There was an interesting programme of BBC Radio 4 yesterday. 'The Long View' that looked amongst other things at the Amateur movement. The idea of which was that sport should be carried out for the love of it and not the money. Prior to its invention by the Victorians, sports such as boxing were highly commercial.

The amateur movement has largely reverted to commercialism these days and I guess the experiment and the ideals have faded. It was founded with the best of intentions, but was always something of a sham.

It struck me that there are interesting parallels with the open source movement. Originally, it was founded with the best of intentions and great things were created by amateurs. These days, the big boys have taken over projects like MySQL and everything seems to me to be becoming more and more commercial.

Will open source eventually go the way of amateur sport?

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