All those snarky elitists who want to keep open source “pure” — and, it follows, poor — remind Tech’s bottom line author Bill Snyder of children. Take MySQL, for instance, which experienced a fair bit of nastiness about the decision to make a small set of features in WorkBench available to paying customers only. “Imagine that. Asking people to pay for something useful,” Snyder writes in Open source needs an attitude adjustment. Somebody has to pay for software to be written, regardless of what so-called purists say. In fact, Savio Rodrigues asserts, OSS needs leaders willing to stand up to the community lest OSS forever be a small slice of the software market. As it stands now, OSS is assimilating into the mainstream. “Is that bad?” Snyder asks. “I’d say no. If anything, it’s a tribute to the quality of thinking behind open source projects. And so is the huge flow of capital from VCs to young open source companies.” Technology Industry