On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 12:27, Ross Werner wrote: > How Free Software "really" works ... (im[ns]ho, of course ...) > > On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Lars E. Olson wrote: > > > I'm sure everyone recognizes this as the Freeloader Effect. Alice > > doesn't care about the economy as a whole as much as she cares about her > > own net worth. What's to stop that from happening? > > > > Incorrect answer: make Alice and Bob both pay $1,000 for C-Money(tm), > > or have them split the cost (i.e. Free as in freedom, not free as in > > beer.) Why is this incorrect? Because this does not require Carol to > > make her software Free-- the same scenario can easily exist with > > proprietary software. > > The is the correct answer: > > Carol writes C-Money for her own accounting needs. She realizes it's not > really good enough software to compete with ProprietaryMoney, which costs > $300 and is a pretty decent product. So she opens the source under a > freely distributable license. She probably couldn't make any money off it > anyway. Dave comes along and sees some bugs and improvements he could > make, and spends a little of his time making C-Money into C++-money. > Multiply Dave times several other people, for perhaps several years, and > suddenly C-Money is a Free alternative to ProprietaryMoney, and is close > to the same level (or perhaps even far and above ProprietaryMoney, > depending on who's developing ProprietaryMoney). > > Alternative scenario: > > BigCompany Q needs an accounting package. They hire Carol to write this > accounting package for them. This accounting package is pretty customized, > and can't compete with ProprietaryAccounts which is already on the market. > So the company decides to release the source, hoping that over time enough > Daves will contribute to it to make it worthwhile. Worst case, they > haven't lost anything.
Now we just to get everyone inside the BigCompany Qs to see things this way ;) I think they all still keep a lot more internally written software proprietary and internal that they do open source, in hopes of making a buck off of it someday. I'm recently read some press releases about IBM selling some sort of back-end chip design software that they've been using internally for years to some other software company, and I'm not allowed to say how many internal HP tools will likely never be open sourced. They both open source some stuff too and I'm seeing HP use more open source solutions for internal stuff (see http://www.collab.net/), but it all depends on which people inside the company are making the decisions. Bryan ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
