On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Sebin Jacob <[email protected]> wrote: >> I do not know who used the logo of FSF-India. However I too feel that for >> the cause of free software they should not have used logo of a private >> company which does not even have a democratic structure. > > Dear Keraleean, > > Are you suggesting that private company / ownership is a bad thing in > itself? AFAIK, the Free Software stands for property rights. > > "Some people think free software goes against the principal of property > ownership. However, if I buy a CD at the store, intellectual property says I > don't have ownership rights of a CD. If I did, I could do anything with it I > wanted to. Without the bizarre intellectual property game, I own what I > buy." - Jonathan Bartlett > And what is bad in a private company? > > Canonical is a private company. Red Hat is a private company. Many private > companies are already having sustainable business models built on FS. > > For instance, > > * Perl is supported by the publisher who makes money from Perl books. > * GCC and the Win32 port of many GNU tools is supported by Cygnus/RedHat who > sell support/consulting services > * Various open source initiatives have been supported by Sun make their OS > more standard/enhanced. > * Apache has been supported by IBM, Sun, and others for their own reasons > > These business models have been around for *years* and they show no signs of > disappearing anytime soon. > > One business model that's often overlooked isn't really a business model. > Companies that depends on software that they don't want to specialize in > creating (e.g. a software company that doesn't want to create a custom > installation package) will often contribute to an existing open source > project that specializes in that area (e.g. RPM) because it saves them the > money and resources it develop an inhouse solution. They contribute to the > main stream of development because the don't want to keep patching their > software against the new versions or because they want those features to be > a defacto standard. - Anil Wang > > I have copy pasted both quotes from the comments of an early Linux Today > article. > > Maybe, these arguments seem slightly away from your opposition. But what I > was trying to say was, even if FSFI is a private company, they cannot be > blamed for that.India's vote against OOXML in favor of ODF as ISO standard > was made possible becouse of FSFI. If FSFI had a democratically elected
Had wanted some clarity on this for sometime now.. Are you saying that India's vote against OOXML(ODF was allready an Open Standard) was made possible *only* because of FSF-I, or was made possible *majorly* because of FSF-I or was made possible because of FSF-I and other entities(one of many) efforts. Or something like FSF-I co-ordinated all effort towards this, meaning without the co-ordinating entity, there would have been no effort. What is FSF-I official position on this. > organisational setup, the chapters like FSF Chennai would have been > mushroomed overnight and it would have been hijacked by vested interest > groups - let alone CPI(M). We have known such things in co-operative society > / bank elections, here in Kerala for quite a long time. > > -Sebin > > > -- > ...if I fought with you, if i fell wounded and allowed no one to learn of my > suffering, if I never turned my back to the enemy: Give me your blessing! > (Nikos Kazantzakis) > > _______________________________________________ > Fsf-friends mailing list > [email protected] > http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends > > _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list [email protected] http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends
