This is a very interesting interview. Not surprisingly, ESR thinks that the open source community's greatest misstep has basically been Stallman...
Q: Open source now enjoys a rich and complex history, which is largely the result of trial and error over the years. What would you say have been the open source community's greatest missteps, or lessons learned?
A: We made our biggest misstep back around 1985, by letting our advocacy function get almost completely captured by the Free Software Foundation. On a purely technical level, open source could have become an effective movement any time after inexpensive 32-bit PCs became available around 1987. As it was, we lost 10 years because our theory was weak and politically tainted, our community fragmented, and our propaganda ludicrously inept.
To be fair, neither I nor anybody else wanted the advocacy job at the time. But it's notable that open source didn't break out of its hardcore-geek ghetto until Linus Torvalds and I found a better story to tell about it after 1997. Did you know that the Mayans invented the wheel but only used it for children's toys? Narratives really matter; open source wasn't the first technology to languish at the margins because it hadn't found the right generative myth yet, and it's unlikely to be the last.
