I’ve had it. I officially declare that I am not part of the open source community. I am in no way associated with it at all. I may just happen to use open source projects, I may just happen to contribute stuff back from time to time and I may even have an apache.org email address but please don’t associate me with the open source community. So to Marc Fleury, Michael Tiemann and Jonathan Schwartz you can have open source – I don’t want it anymore. However I would still be proud to be considered part of the Apache Community (even though they just happen to create open source software) and probably a bunch of other organizations that just happen to create open source software that I’m yet to get involved with – I just don’t want to be associated with the pathetic one-up-manship and ego trips that has come to dominate the “open source community”. I don’t just mean from corporate blogs either (though that’s what set this rant off), there’s far too much emphasis on who’s better or who’s “more” open source or whether or not things are “open source enough” rather than concentrating on building a strong community which is directed towards a specific goal (which may just happen to involve creating open source software). The need to focus on community applies to pretty much anything where people have to work together, proprietary software teams need to work well together as a community of developers just as much as open source developers (having someone walk away from a project generally hurts a lot more in the commercial world). Oh and don’t even get me started on these people who try to insist that open source software isn’t the opposite of commercial software – the intent of the author is clear, get over it. If you want to be picky, Jonathan Schwartz is right on one thing – open source is not the opposite of proprietary. Just because you have the code doesn’t make it any less proprietary – it just makes it easier to develop interoperability solutions. Oh and for the record – yes this is just an incoherent rant that is most likely contradictory and only partially thought through. Heaven forbid it might also contain a misplaced apostrophe…