At 03:02 PM 7/4/2003 -0700, you wrote: >A better question is how do I get a piece of the pie? >For that, again, the answer is research. No one likes >to do it, but that's how you find where the money went.
You wander quite a bit in your response, ranging from government funding to a programmer itching a scratch, so I think you missed my point. I'll try to further clarify my thoughts and question through another example. Assume consumers need a product that an open source developer hasn't had the itch to scratch. Knowing this, who pays for the software to be created? Under Will's concept that "software companies will adopt free software and earn their living by implementing it for people", a single consumer, or if we are lucky a group of consumers, pay the cost of that implementation. With this model the cost of the project is very high for a small group of people, whereas if you can spread the cost of development across the entire market the cost per-person is greatly reduced. This is basic economics. Whether commercial software is good or bad is another matter. How can open source developers use this principle to their advantage? The issue I see is that with open source you cannot charge for the use of the software by others. Therefore, as Will noted, the cost in many instances (but certainly not all or even possibly most) will be that a subset of potential users will bear the cost of implementation. In this contract-based software structure that subset of users then has a high cost. --- Dustin Puryear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Puryear Information Technology <http://www.puryear-it.com> Providing expertise in the management, integration, and security of Windows and UNIX systems, networks, and applications.
