On Wednesday 29 June 2005 13:19, Nzer Zaidenberg wrote:
> While I do appriciate the buisness advice, ...
> ...we operate in financial segements with banks and mainframes.
As someone who used Rexx on a mainframe circa 1984 (CMS/3 IIRC)
I'll try to ignore your patronizing attitude and boasting about
the hardware your potential clients use.
Instead let's focus on your other valid points.
> nobody here is an attacker. my target market size is about 2000
> installations and nobody will put cracked version of my software
> on the ineternet.
Good. Than the binary/source issue (as a "protection" measure) is moot.
> In our market companies live of maintance fees, there are very few new
> clients and people pay you to introduce new systems to their already
> existing solutions.
Agreed. That's why I said that the important factors for selling into
the corporate market are your company ability to deliver the required
services on-time and in a dependable manner.
> you may not like it but then you may like to know that this market
> rolls between 40-50 B$ a year depends who you ask.
Not like it? On the contrary, you describe an industry that use mostly
custom made solution (no shrink wrap "CompUSA" type of software) which
is ideal for open-source deployment (since the software stays in
the client organization anyway).
BTW: ~80% of the software in the world is of this type. The prepackaged
software we see everywhere is just the tip of the software iceberg.
What you completely failed to explain is why you need to "hide" the
source with such a dependable client base... or maybe the picture
is not so bright as you try to portray.
> saying closed source has no place ...
Closed source has a temporary place (probably for many years), until
enough customers understand the lock-in effect it place on them.
The problem is that once closed source software is used in important
segment of the enterprise it gives the software vendor absolute power
over its client -- and as they say:
"absolute power corrupts absolutely"
> charging by the hour in this market is impossible because nobody will
> pay me 10,000$ an hour... sorry the market size is no bigger then
> about 10 installation in israel maybe couple of thousends world wide.
Charging by the hour, by number of license copies sold or by number of
CPU's are just techniques to fund the development. So the question
is the same:
Are there enough customers with enough interest to pay the bill?
The form of payment has (almost) no effect on the development costs.
> they convince managers that in the open source world there are only
> mindless teenagers who like to mumble alot.
They can think what they want. In every major change in there are
always those "late adopters", we find them later in the history dustbin
trying to get a hold on the changing reality around them.
"TCP/IP? sockets? Have you taken LSD in Berkeley? We stay with SNA!"
> mosts linux distros are closing their source at least partially.
> red hat has RHE, Suse was baught by Novell. mysql is far from "open".
Let's stick to facts and not FUD. You are right about Suse (which
AFAIK contain proprietary software), but wrong about the other
two:
- Even RHEL contain only free software. The only reason you cannot
distribute the *binaries* is their trademark. In fact there are
several free distributions that are created by rebuilding the
*same* source packages that comprise RHEL. E.g:
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
http://www.centos.org/
http://taolinux.org/
- MySQL is GPL'ed, need I say more?
> ... and models involving selling licenses are much easier.
Of course they are easier, but they are bad for customers.
That's why the alternative model of FOSS is so successfull.
I wish you luck with your plans and I am sure that if your company
can give a good product and *service* for a price your market will
take -- that what would happen (regardless of the openness of the source).
Cheers,
--
Oron Peled Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
ICQ UIN: 16527398
But it does move!
-- Galileo Galilei
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