Too many cooks? Open Source vs Commercial Part 3

(This is part 3 of my post titled Too many cooks? Open Source vs Commercial Part 1 and Too many cooks? Open Source vs Commercial Part 2)

There's no question that open source vs. commercial debate is interesting, heated, and neverending. I liken this debate to traditional bipartisan government politics. On the left we have the bleeding heart liberals, fighting aganst the man, struggling to make the little guy heard. On the right there's the corporate big-wigs, who support big business and share a laissez faire attitude.

Let's see...which is which? Not too hard to see that open source = left and commercial = right. The interesting part about all this is that almost all the people I talk to out here who are big open source supporters are also left leaning, Starbucks hating, Microsoft bashing, tree huggers.

Now I consider myself independent and non-partisan in my views. I believe in many Democratic ideals, as well as having some strong Republican views. Not to mention some of my Green Party and other leftist viewpoints as well. So you might say I am a political "mutt" with left and right wing leanings.

I like Starbucks, Microsoft, WalMart, Target, and all the other big businesses that have come to signify "the man", as well as Adobe, Windows, Macromedia, and other commercial software. I also like PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, and other open source software that I use daily in my career.

So where does that leave me here in Silicon Valley? Basically, nowhere different than anyone else. That's the magic of the Bay Area. Tolerance. Diversity. I have shared my views with many and have very interesting debates, but then continue with what we were doing. It's all good.

Which brings me to my conclusion on this entire topic. Open source vs. Commercial? Simple...it's all good.