Interesting article explaining the observation that proprietary software tends to get worse with each release and open source tends to get better. I agree that many of the commercial software applications that I use seem to have "peaked" several versions ago. I also agree that an open source committer team is more empowered than a commercial software architect to push features/enhancements out of scope. Jacob asserts that no commercial software company could resist pressure from IBM to support DB2 but Django does. However, I wonder if this trend is just a matter of software maturity and time. Most of the commercial software applications are older than the open source ones and have time to "jump the shark" with features that don't belong. Some FOSS programs will, no doubt, be tempted to add bad features after the good features have been added. The better projects will resist. Examples include Apache HTTPD and Struts. These projects started over when they were done. - Seth Gottlieb