Carr is especially insightful this week.

The tortured logic of peer-production, anything more simple and clear would not be able to fool the simple-minded!

Stabbing Polonius: Larry Sanger, the cofounder of Wikipedia and, more recently, the sole founder of Citizendium, another online volunteer-written encyclopedia, if at the moment one that remains curled tightly in a fetal position, has written an essay about "the new politics of knowledge" for the journal Edge. It is long, well-meaning, and unreadable. Here's a taste of Sanger's deathful prose...

It's like [expletive] Polonius has come back to life. Get thee back behind the arras, pierced old fool, and badger us not with thine tedious pedantry!

OK, maybe that's a little harsh. I wish Sanger well. Although I think Citizendium will flop - it's too late to market and it comes wrapped in an ornate intellectual scaffolding...

But does Carr forget that the ethereal trumps the material in religious endeavors? Software programmers don't need to make money if they lay their code at the alter of Stallman. They can always eat their code if they get hungry.

Open source and the programmer's dilemma: Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger. At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior.

If the FOSS crowd finds itself assailed on all sides for its morals, perhaps that will get FOSS focused on business and innovation.