John Cooper wrote:
If it was so easy we would all be a millionaires by now. Getting the business model right is still difficult for FLOSS projects, but some are making good money and are attracting investors.
Has anyone here heard of Perl's DBI? It's initial development was funded by my employer and it was developed by our then tech director. My boss would not say this himself but my gut feel is that FLOSSing this code base ended up costing the company maybe a half mill or so. The insane volume of infected "spam" *still* hitting Tim's old email address (now used as a spamtrap) is sometimes still visible. Other costs included having to deal with the Y2K panic and legal "threats". Quite simply there is a cost involved when you give software away - and some of that cost is often unplanned. Jacqui p.s. I developed a web "template engine" many many years ago and it still "whomps tha ass" off the competition - the problem is that the user interface is seriously expensive to design and develop so it sits there in the software libs slowly dying. It would probably make an ideal FLOSS project but given the hidden costs involved with DBI, *I* (not my boss) am reticent upon falling into that trap again. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
