On Sat, 5 Jun 2004, Marius Amado Alves wrote: > - I'm wrong, in which case I'm honestly interested in being proved such
You are wrong ;-) This is wrong just as anyone who claims you can't sell bottled water just because it is also open source (H2O, no monopoly on its sale, etc, etc) is wrong. Granted this is an analogy between a rivalrous-tangible and a non-rivalrous (or with software, anti-rivalrous) intangible, and such analogies are never identical. I do find that mentioning bottled water often gets people out of being extremely limited by legacy software business models based on monopoly rents. What you can't do with commercial selling of open source is base your business on a monopoly rent, or other type of less-competitive monopoly. That is just one relatively minor business model, not the only way to "sell software". -- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Open letters with Susan Crean http://www.flora.ca/creators/ Petition for Users' Rights, Protect Internet creativity and innovation Election 2004: http://digital-copyright.ca/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3