Re: A Linux Today story has been mailed to you!

[Kingsly John <kingslyj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Biju Chacko wrote:

 |I think the model starts to break down when the ppl who _take_ start
 |to out number the ppl who _give_. That is, when there are far more ppl
 |just downloading isos with out sending patches and bug reports than
 |there are developers and responsible users; then our model stops being
 |self-sustaining.

No I don't think so... if a company with like M$FT could take control of
the world market... without a *single* user ever sending in a patch!! why
should we be worried about users not sending in patches ???

Actually as more and more such people enter the scene it just gets better
for opensource.(OSS will win the numbers game)

And remember what was taught in school about too many cooks....  :o)

As for sending bug reports ... if people felt that their report would be
acted upon and fixed (unlike the BSOD!)... I don't think they would
hesitate to file one ... coz unlike M$FT ... OSS bug fixes happen a LOT
faster.

And why won't it be self sustaining ?? 

if there are enough users there will always be scope for companies to
offer solutions/support for that product and if a company sees enough
scope it can always adopt the project (provide bandwidth etc) Suse, Redhat
etc are doing this already

as was pointed out in the story the developers can profit from selling
manuals and boxed kits also

Take for example the case of GIMP (gimp.org).. IMO it should have probably
a very low percentage of programmers as users and not everyone likes
reading/learning from a monitor and Printing a full color copy of the GUM
(gimp users manual) costs a fortune...

so there is definitely a market for shrinkwrapped boxes ... may not be
very large but then again it exists. 

And again you need to remember not everyone in the world thinks about the
cost ... after all 90%+ of PC users are willing to pay over $100 for an OS
that crashes everyday and then we have the apple users who don't mind
paying because they get a quality product!

When people get a quality product at an affordable price... they will
definitely go for it.

We already have major manufacturers selling PCs preloaded with Linux (cuts
the price of the machine upto 20% in certain cases)

And one very important thing to remember that around 80% of PC users don't
use it as anything more than a glorified typewriter/game console. They
don't care what OS they use as long as they get their job done.(in fact
most of them don't even know what an OS is)

Kingsly

	        .:: Kingsly John                ICQ 14787510 ::.
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            .:: Linux 2.4.3 #5 Sun Apr 8 17:10:55 IST 2001 i686 ::.
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           `:. Posted to the list on Mon Apr 16 14:34:28 IST 2001 .:'