As usual, Jeff mixes different concepts, does some hand-waving and comes to a stunningly weird conclusion. What Microsoft did with artificial memory limitation is ridiculous, unless someone comes up to offer a reasonable technical explanation. However, I find it equally ridiculous to jump from there to a conclusion that open source is better because it does no market segmentation.
Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)?
Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.
Let's keep one thing clear, if you're not selling your product then you won't do any market segmentation for it. You might, however, do market segmentation when it comes to offering support for that product. Does that make you as evil as Microsoft? Are 37 Signals evil because they offer different plans whose prices probably don't scale linearly with the costs behind them (in other words, they don't get the same profit across plans)?
Of course, Jeff didn't actually use the word "evil", but the implication of moral inferiority is almost palpable. Open source has many advantages (and disadvantages, too), but not segmenting the market is not one of those; rather, it's a consequence of not selling the software itself.