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

[Kingsly John <kingslyj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Biju Chacko wrote:

 |Microsoft prosecutes ppl who dont pay for the software!
Nobody wants another Bill Gates or M$FT .. the future is small companies
which will be financially sound.

 |Look, no company can survive giving away something for nothing. The
 |rationale behind OSS is that the ppl who download it for free will pay
 |for it in patches, bug reports, docs or what have you. By returning
                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
So if the person is incapable of submitting patches/bugreports and the
likes... it's equally likely that he's a computer illiterate... who will
in all probability have a few $$$ to spare for the friendly neighbourhood
OpenSource Solution/Support Provider to do the needful for him.

(So... he is supporting the business model!!! ;-)
 
 |_something_ to the community, the costs are shared too. It works on
 |the honour system -- nobody insists that you do so.

Exactly... you can't force anyone to do anything... but left to themselves
people will do what is right.


 |But if the majority of customers neither return to the community or
 |purchase the for-profit value additions, then where does that leave

What category would these people fall into ?? 

 |the Open Source commercial company? They do not get paid _and_ their
 |development costs are not being reduced by community patches.

I subscribe to Raju's views on this... the company should be looking at
 support and solutions and not in a product itself.

And we have people like Mario who feel that they are not contributing
enough.... if he sees an opportunity I'm sure he'll contribute.(there must
be loads of people like that)

The one opensource product that everyone of us here have used the most is
the linux kernel ... how many lines of code have we contributed to it ??
if 30% of the worlds servers run linux... how many of them contributed
anything back to the kernel project ??

At any given point of time.. there will always be enough people to sustain
a product.. if the development of a product dies.. it will be due to lack
of response... and there won't be any marketing blitzkreigs trying to sell
the unpopular product.(I am certain that a LOT of projects in sourceforge
will die a natural death in the years to come.... but we should look at
the sucess stories that emerge from them.)

And here's one phenomenon which I don't think many people have given much
thought to .... retirement ... software is one of the youngest industries
in the world today ... so there aren't many people who are retired
software pros. ... but in another 10-20 years.. there's going to be steady
stream of people who fall into that cateogory.

And they might take to contributing code to keep themselves busy in their
post-retirement days. (I personally know a lot of senior citizens who work
not because they need the money but because they don't like staying idle)

So there'll be no dearth of people contributing code ... so the open
source movement can only get stronger.

And if you look at the open source community as a corporate entity.... it
must be without doubt the largest one in terms of /employees/ , products
and diversity (from palm tops to Super Computers). and it's a not for
profit organisation and it cannot make losses! (How much better can it get
?)


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 18:17:21 IST 2001 .:'