[ILUG] Re: busness models

[Ferren MacIntyre]

>From: Larry McVoy <lm at bitmover.com>
>Subject: business models [was patent stuff]
>Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 15:24:52 -0700

>If the free software community is ever going to really compete with the
>non-free software community, they simply have to come up with a better
>business model than giving it away and trying to make money on support.

In 1936, Warbasse, the President of the British Cooperative Society wrote
an optimistic book called _Cooperative Democracy_, describing a world which
most of us would like to live in.  He really thought it was about to
happen.  But then he said things like, 'To whom does profit belong?  Not to
the capitalists, who merely put up money; not to the workers, who are [one
hopes] adequately paid, but to the consumers who create it by paying too
much.'  This proved to be the only challenge that Capitalism and Communism
united to quash, and they did a pretty good job.  Yet a few co-ops survive:
Harvard Coop (rhymes with 'chicken ...'), REI, Sunkist, and Calavo come to
mind, along with mutual insurance companies and an occasional public
utility.  The Coop and REI behave a lot like ordinary businesses except in
the way they distribute dividends, but they seem to survive.

Many academics find it necessary to write software, and are paid for doing
so as part of their normal job.  Some are perfectly willing to donate the
results to the public domain, and go on to other projects -- meaning that
maintenance is thereafter nonexistent.  My own experience with 20 years of
using my plotting routine (GuyFawkes, the Inept Plotter) is that I still
rewrite bits of it every time I use it:  over the years and as needed it
has added hidden lines, matrix rotation for 3-D 'fishnet' plots, splines,
triangular plots, &c.  It is written in Forth and runs on the Mac, and if
that isn't a niche market, I don't know what is.  But it does pretty well
what I want it to do, which is otherwise hard to come by.

The other side of McVoy's question then becomes, How might I put this
program (which the public paid to create) into the public domain, in any
useful way?

In a rational world, academic Computer Science Departments would generate
public-domain software.  Knuth comes to mind.  (UCG's people -- who took 14
weeks to reconnect me to the web when I changed computers without asking
them first -- seem to feel that their job is to teach people to use Windows
so they can get jobs, which is a notch below prostitution on my scale of
values.)

Microsoft's approach of intentional obsolescence of basic utility programs
is simply unethical, but nobody seems to care, and it generates lots of
money.  Considering the amount of brainpower around, we ought to be able to
figure out a viable business model.   (I'm not much help on this:  I work
equally hard whether I'm paid or not, spent half my normal working life
underpaid and happy, and 7 years into retirement put in unpaid 10-hour days
at the same sort of basic-research pro-bono stuff.  In other words, I enjoy
my work, and am gullibly exploitable by anyone who will let me do it.)

I don't know how MacForth has stayed in business, but I just got a free
upgrade to OS X.  http://www.macforth.com might have some ideas.

Nisus, http://www.nisus.com , another academic-run company, produces an
inexpensive Mac word processor which is far superior to Word, and they've
stayed in business and might have ideas too.





Cheers,

--Ferren

_______________________________________

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Dr Ferren MacIntyre       |   The Mews, Carnacrow
MRI, Nat. Uni. Ireland     |   HEADFORD, Co. Galway
Galway, Ireland               |   Ireland
+353 91 52 4411 x3202   |  +353 93 35 0 27
http://www.geocities.com/ferrenmaci/
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