Originally posted by sp

---

First I want to state that I'm a bit of an extremist/open-source zealot. Why? In my opinion people who don't open-source their freeware are assholes. I can forgive them if they have legal reasons for not releasing their code but any other excuse definitely falls on deaf ears with me.

Good, that's out of the way. Now about the topic. I firmly believe that more information = better than and available source code is more information than any documentation could ever contain. Arguing for more documentation while simultaneously arguing for closed source is completely grotesque in my opinion.

The core of all progress is the simplification of earlier inventions. That's not just the case for software, but for the rest of the world too. In the years after Gottlieb Daimler invented the automobile it was so complicated that it was seen purely as a tool for engineers who know to fix their cars basically on the fly (because early cars were difficult to control and broke down a lot). Only a few decades later, people like Henry Ford managed to simplify automobiles so far that even normal people could use them.

This is not just true for cars, but for most if not all inventions.

Combine this with another aspect of life. There are no geniuses. Nope, none. Isaac Newton once said that "If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants". Using this sentence he tried to explain why he invented so much more than his contemporaries. He studied the history of his field a lot more than others and studying that gave him an advantage over others. He knew what was already tried and failed and he knew what wasn't tried yet and could concentrate his efforts on those areas.

There are other examples. Who invented the telephone? Graham Bell? No. The telephone was invented by (at least) Antonio Meucci, Charles Bourseul, Johann Philipp Reis, Cromwell Varley, Poul la Cour, Elisha Gray, Thomas Edison and finally Alexander Graham Bell. The invention of the telephone was not the work of a genius (because they don't exist). It was the work of many people who studied what their ancestors in the fields of electrical engineering developed and they all improved on these ideas.
It's the same with the steam engine. Think James Watt invented it? Nope. By the time James Watt made his significant contribution to the steam engine some hundred of them were already running in Great Britain. James Watt merely studied them and found ways to improve them.

We don't have to limit this to great inventions. Here's a ROM hacking example. If FCEUXD had not been open source there would most likely be no symbolic debugging or conditional breakpoints in NES emulators today. I do not have the time to develop a NES emu myself just to make a better debugger. I am not sure if even have the skills to write my own one. I can, however, guarantee you 100% that I would have never implemented anything like I did in FCEUXD SP if I couldn't have built upon the work of the earlier contributors to the FCE/FCEU/FCEUXD project(s). And - in my fairly biased view - this would be quite unfortunate. I really like symbolic debugging and conditional breakpoints.

What I want to say is that a closed source policy is against many of the most important aspect of inventing and developing. You want to deny us the ability to build on the works of our "ancestors", you want us to reinvent the wheel over and over again, you want to deny us the necessary simplification (for example in the form of libraries that could be developed for common tasks) to make quick advances, you want us to be geniuses (which don't exist) and you want to force us to be the first "giant" in line over and over again.

I ask you, how's that any better than just making programs open source?

---

Originally posted by insectduel

---

I plan write more information while you guys can't.

---