I've heard some people complain about proprietary software and that ALL software should be open source...
Now, I just can't quite grasp that whole concept.
Lets say Microsoft made all their software open source. How would they make money then?
Anyone could just download & compile the source code to get a working product, right?
Sure, computer illiterate people would probably still buy it off the shelf, since they wouldn't even know what a compiler is, but then again, they could get an already compiled version from one of their friends who did download & compile it...
Also, how would they defend their patents when anyone & everyone could copy & paste some of their code into their own programs? Could they even get patents?
Wouldn't that increase the risk of people writing viruses or backdoors directly into the code and submitting it back to the company along with a fix for some other problem?
Who would own the copyright on new code submitted by the outside world?