Peer review and public acessibility makes Open Source superior

In no other engineering discipline would an engineer criticise another for using a standard object to perform a familiar task: the demand that every engineer create a new object or technique for a task is a demand unique to software.

Not even Microsoft believes this. A developer in the Windows environment is expected to reuse components provided by Microsoft. The reason that Windows applications resemble each other is simple: they use the same components to draw things like menus and dialog boxes on the screen. Developers "build programs without doing all the development work" in the Windows environment as they do in the Open Source environment - the difference is that in the world of Windows, you aren't allowed to know too much about the components you're using.

Healy concludes that "Open Source does not really provide protections for the best developers". I agree because that's not the role of Open Source.

Neither the platform nor the rights regime exist to protect developers. That's the job of the developers themselves: the best developers, like the best engineers, be protected not by secrecy, but by their own skills, as demonstrated by their published work.

To pretend otherwise is to belittle those skills. At bottom, Healy's assertions are founded on a lack of confidence. Software developers' fear isn't that other developers are better - but that "anyone can do this". If software is easy there might be no need for developers.

I don't believe that.