Good! Linux-il is not just about bits, we're also about ideals and socialism :)
On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote: > Endeavour2, there was drag and drop, but one which Xmms refused to > accept. I contacted their support person, a certain Taura Milana Taura Milana is a multi-talented woman, and she's the one who wrote the application, so it WOULD make perfect sense to contact her, being the main developer... please don't play down her part as a mere "support person" :) > She quickly reproduced a patched Alpha version of Endeavour 2, which I > downloaded and found to drag and drop extra-fine into Xmms. great, but that's because she's a very nice person. did you try that with Shareware? are you sure a commercial product would not have gotten the same level of attention? and OTOH, have you never seen rude replies from OSS developers that would tell you "you have the source, patch it yourself, I'm busy"? As much as it is heart-warming to see this type of stories, it's a story about the humans behind the software, not about the licensing scheme that's in front of it (feel free to change the juxtaposition in your mind). Nice people will be nice everywhere, though in my heart, I want to believe that nice people tend to choose releasing their stuff as OSS, given the financial possibility. > I believe the moral of this story is something along the lines of ESR's > the Cathedral and the Bazaar or Muli's "what Linux is to me" Haifux' C&B is a heap of bull, excuse me. > By working in an OSS Ms. Milana and I were able to add a new > feature, just by Using the Source<tm>. Can you do it in MS-Windows > with the same technical and legal ease? I highly doubt it. no. but if Endeavour was a commercial product, open source or not, they would be obliged to pass it through a long cycle and QA and all sorts of stuff to be able to give you warrenty on the product, because money changed hands to license the product and they are liable for legal action on your part if that quick patch ruins something. the moral is: Gratis OSS = no warrenty. for warrenty you need thourough QA, man hours spent on methodic testing and legal backup. that costs money, so clients must be charged money, which in turn makes free redistribution a hole in the developer's pocket. Commercial OSS is not a theoretical problem, it is literally doesn't pay the rent. see what happend to VA-Research in the last 4 years, see Red-Hat's stock situation. the FSF is doing fine, but mostly from donations. So how DO you make OSS work financially? take the "donation to society" concept one step forward, call it a a social donation by law and award those individuals from the taxpayers' money. when you want to judge a Redmond monopoly to do "Avodot Sherut Lakehila", you make them develop an app the community needs, dictate the specs and make them finance development and QA. you can't make them open existing source retroactively because of the messy patent laws, but donating new OSS is not such a bad idea, and not too utopic or idealistic. I think I already saw a few days ago an article in /. about legal standartization of public-funded development to be released to the public who funded it. Think about it... -- (@- Please do NOT cc: me answers posted also to the list //\ Send me private mail at <YourName (at) ira.abramov.org> v_/_ to send me spam please use: cat spam.txt > /dev/hda ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
