Cisco provides a lesson: why closed source pwns you

Cisco provides a lesson:

This is why anyone who makes excuses for closed source in network-facing software is not just a fool deluded by shiny marketing but a malignant idiot whose complicity with what those vendors do will injure his neighbors as well as himself.

…

This is why you should demand open source in your router, open source in your operating system, and open source in any application software that is important to your life. Because if you don’t own it, it will surely own you.

(Via Armed and Dangerous)

I’m not into the zealotry of free software, as epitomized by Richard Stallman, and I sneer at developers who won’t buy software “on principle.” I take a more pragmatic approach, using the best tools that are reasonably priced, and I have no problem with closed source. Raymond nails it with this piece on Cisco. Required reading.