[ILUG] Re: Is Linux Dying?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting david jamison (david.jamison1 at ntlworld.com):

> Im not sure if Ive missed the point here entirely.

{shrug}  It's par for the course.  However, it would be appreciated if
you would _quote properly_:  Your levels of quotation were so
(inappropriately) flattened as to make it look as if _you_ had written
the text you quoted from my earlier post.  Please don't do that (again).
There's a reason why MUAs' editors retain multiple levels of quotation
via their quoting prefixes.

I'm retroactively correcting your quoting, in what follows:

>> Forgive me, but are you new to Linux?  We in the Linux community did to
>> death the whole open-source business models thing, about a decade ago.
>> You might want to read back-post archives of the FSB (free software
>> business) mailing list.
> 
> Hmmm.....A decade ago?  Isnt that an awful long time in computing terms?

Ancient.  

The Open Source Initiative was founded in 1998, and its list of essays
describing open-source business models went up on their Web site right
away.  The reason those were available to be posted immediately is that
they'd been the subject of discussion for years and years.

>>>When the Open source movement was conceived like so many other things 
>>>did anyone expect software development to proceed down a route where 
>>>software would be essentially FREE?
>> 
>> Miconception.  Software is never completely gratis:  There are always
>> costs.  Otherwise, most certainly the founders were entirely aware of
>> the concept of a software ecology without specific monetary charges for
>> acquisition and use.  For one thing, it wasn't a new concept:  It had
>> been done all the way back to mainframe days.  To the contrary, the
>> notion of software as product was the newcomer notion.  
> 
> Fair point.  But in the now software is most certainly product thanks I 
> suppose largely to the efforts of Microsoft?

I can't help noticing you're somewhat changing the subject.  You
expressed incredulity that the movement could have been founded on a
model of software being "essentially free" (by which you seem to have
meant gratis).  Leaving aside the fundamental error of assuming that any
software ever completely lacks costs, I pointed out that
software-as-product was actually the outlandish novel notion, and
previously software was almost never considered something it made sense
to retain proprietary control over.

In any event, my larger -- and most central -- point was that there have
always been, and probably always will be, proprietary supersets on top
of Linux for which people want money.  Your supposition that things have
changed is simply not supported by the facts.

> I suppose my question would then be if there are costs who pays these
> costs and how is that revenue generated? 

{sigh}  This is neither the time nor the place to go over all possible
models for businesses that use, or produce, open source software.
However, you might want to start with the essays on the OSI site,
http://www.opensource.org/

>>>Invent a world beating product - the next big thing - AND GIVE IT
>>>AWAY?
>>
>> The notion of open source being "giving away" the copyrighted materials
>> is a time-honoured basic error.  If you want to find out for yourself,
>> try grabbing a copy of GNU emacs, use it in fashion contrary to its
>> licence, and lob an e-mail boasting about that fact to FSF.  You'll find
>> out very quickly -- through contact with their legal staff -- that they
>> still very much own the rights to it.The mere fact that most journalists 
>> can never seem to get this point right
>> doesn't mean you shouldn't.
> 
> Well, I was being slightly flippant or rhetorical with this comment.  I do 
> feel the point stands though.

You can feel it all you want; it's still wrong.  ;->

[My list of the traditional answers to the question "where does the
profit come from?"]

> Are these issues then just coming into sharper focus now?  

Nope.

> Isn't there a lot of debate around the COST of software Total Cost of 
> Ownership and so on?

Not debate in any real sense:  Rather, PR warfare.

Your other "questions" (omitted) strike me as the tirekicking kind.
Waste of time, really.  People who are serious do pilot projects instead
of wanking around asking those.

-- 
Cheers,           find / -user your -name base -print | xargs chown us:us
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com