On Saturday 14 October 2006 19:12, Rony wrote:
> Hmm. So in reality, he did not earn any money from the sales of the > wonderful piece of software he created for the world, while > everyone down the line is making mega bucks installing, customizing > and maintaining his software. If the same was sponsored by a big > foss supporting institution he would have made money on the > software too. He CAN make hughe amounts of money if he wishes to. And is pretty well off otherwise. He could be making big money from investing in foss companies for all u know, and hence does not need to work - or more appropriately toil - for money. > Whatever other benefits he received would have come his way even if > he made world famous closed software. Really? how do u know. The vast majority of microserfs barely exist as compared to most of the free developers, who besides doing what they love and being failrly well off, get invited to all sorts of seminars and conferences at exotic places. > I am not trying to pull down foss U can try, but it wont make one whit of a diff - ask Bill baba who funded SCO to attack linux and some other idiot who attacked Linus. > but my point is that since it is for the people, it needs > support from large independent foss promoting institutions that pay > good money to developers such that they can release their software > under their own banner. Umm.. if one were in that class u could easily get a couple of million from the venture capitalists, large corps like IBM, Google, RH, Novell, AMD, TYAN yakyakyak and that goes for the closed or open version. Computer associates (and afaik also SAP) released their database under the gpl. Why?. CA then ran a competition 1million USD for the best app on Ingres. Why? There is a major disconnect in your logic. U very illogically believe that closing an app protects your market. Closing your app puts an enormous burden from every side - marketing, development, maintainence, etc - while giving absolutely nothing in return. Tally is closed right? just count the number of legal copies v/s illegal copies around. It's 15 is to one in my vicinity - the one legal copy is mine circa 1995 and a free (fight) upgrade in 98. U think the legal copies were purchased because they were closed? In fact i found that stupid parallel port dongle such a pain in the ass that i cracked it in a couple of hours, wrote (rather copied from stevens) a small tsr that bypassed the dongle. And i neednt have bothered. The floppies were available for Rs.50/-. So what did closing achieve? beats my poor IQ. In developing a closed app u incurr a cost wholly unneccessary, then try to build a business to recoup the cost and find the marketing logistics to be un manageable, then start blaming all the copyright violators for the unrenumerative business, then spend even more money on dongles which u imagine would make software thieves disappear, On the contrary u make them richer, while reducuing your margin. U need to think completely differently on whatever it is U have in mind. But rest assured that closing ANY app does not make one whit of a diff to the final success or failure. Even when very tightly coupled with hardware (Xbox, Sony PS, Cisco AP,). All u do is prevent yourself from recieving code, ideas and new market penetration, while increasing your costs and enriching the crooks. As i said earlier i knew personally many people who wrote state of the art closed packages - with dongle and all - that ran the pants off imported equiv costing 10 times more almost all failed. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
