Rick Sanders wrote:
> Well, you *can* actually make money on GNU software by distributing it in
> its original form. The biggest example is Redhat Software (www.redhat.com)
> and their Linux distribution.
No you can't. The entire GNU/Linux redistribution market supports 5-8 very
small companies: RedHat, Caldera, Debian, Cygnus, err I'm already running out
of companies. It's not certain that more than 2-3 will survive. There's
probably only room for two small companies distributing the entire Linux OS.
So even your biggest example, Linux, with a 7 million installed base, can long
term support less than 1000 developers. I think I'm being generous here. And
that's for a 10 year-old product with lots of free media attention.
Even RedHat, the dominant distributor of Linux, can't fund its growth from own
sales. Compaq, IBM, Novell and Oracle are funding development. Do you think
they're expecting profits from RedHat? No. Essentially those companies are
donating research funds for the benefit of their other product lines. It's
just not a viable business model.
So if Stepan Schejbal wants to charge _commercial_ users (we're not talking
habitat for humanity here), for the use of SJSP, more power to him. If you
compare what Stepan will probably charge against the hourly cost of the
commercial users (and programmers are expensive), it'll almost certainly be a
great deal and probably pay itself back in two weeks -- a month at the
outside.
Scott Ferguson
Caucho Technology
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