Howard Butler wrote:
On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into
the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra
credibility and marketing reach.
Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the
public domain and give them away for free for "extra credibility"?
What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an
intensive training session? IMO, what OTG is doing is a very
classical business model of Open Source development. Publishers like
O'Reilly, Apress, Springer or our own FOSS4G event workshops (did you
know FOSS4G cleared 100k this year? ;) ) follow this exact model.
In answer: OTG doesn't need to put training material into Public Domain,
same as software companies don't need to put software into Open Source.
However, I'd hope that companies would see a good business case for open
data and open documentation for the same reasons we write Open Source
Software. And OSS users would be receptive to Open Documentation
business models.
--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html
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