----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian Lynch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 6:54 PM Subject: Re: [Marketing] Experience at the NEA Conference
> I run a company and we contribute because the business plan works. Ian - well said. We use, support and contribute FLOSS software as follows: We use FLOSS software internally because it saves us a lot of money. (We also use some closed-source software when the TCO is lower.) We support FLOSS software because it saves our clients money, and I'd rather have a couple of days extra consultancy work than the markup on a Windows server licence any day of the week. (We also support proprietary software, because sometimes that's what our clients need.) We release FLOSS software (not, to be fair, in the Office Productivity space), because it gives us back better software. Where we've done this particularly is where we've written software for our internal use, that we were never intending to sell. By making the source-code available, we have found that others have used our software for themselves, but then added features to it that we would never have thought of (or had time to add even if we had), but now get to use as well. We also release closed-source software in some cases, because it makes us more money in particular markets than we believe we could make selling services added to releasing the software under, say, the GPL. I include the stuff about proprietary software explicitly to make the point that, as an organisation, we are NOT using FLOSS software for "evangelical reasons", or to the exclusion of proprietary software. We consider FLOSS as one alternative in a market of others, and use it only when there are good business reasons to do so - now THAT is an argument that, I hope, all businesses should be able to relate to. The "use it because it costs less" argument was the one we started with. The "release source code to internal stuff because then it comes back with extra features" argument isn't something I'd thought of at all, until I read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but in our experience it's definitely worked. Regards, Mark Harrison --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
