Every time I read something by Eric Raymond, I remember an event that occured at the post-TPC1 party. At that party, Heidi Wall (all of about 15 at the time) started asking Eric some pretty tough questions, like "will open source software really work?" Eric paused thoughtfully, and responded that "in the short term, commercial software will win, but open source software will inevitably win in the long term."
As Eric tells the story, Heidi immediately responded with another question: "if commercial software wins in the short term, how can open source win in the long term, if the long term is nothing more than a long sequence of short terms?"
Larry's first born child had Eric Raymond, champion of Open Source Software, painted into a corner with his own rhetoric. Until Eric realized this: "True, the long term is a series of short terms, but over time, second-order effects begin to surface. It is due to those second-order effects that will cause open source to win in the long term".
