On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 11:33 +0000, Andrew Brown wrote: > Sun is not doing this from the goodness of its heart, whatever the > admirable motives of individual Sun developers.
We all know that. Its no different from any other corporate in the Open Source industry. > It's funding and > developing OpenOffice as part of a long-term strategy to weaken Microsoft > and make Sun more profitable. I'd say they would not be the only company to benefit from breaking MS's monopoly. Unfortunately there is rivalry between company's for a whole range of reasons so the politics are complex. > You also have a financial interest in > maximising the penetration of OOo into the education market. Yes, but believe it or not my main aim is to free up the technologies. I can do that more effectively if I have money. Money to me is a means to an end, not the end in itself but only I know whether that is the truth :-) > Don't get me > wrong here. I applaud your interest, and Sun's; and I think that a > thriving third-party market is absolutely necessary if the programme is > to succeed. I want you to make money, and Andrew Pitonyak, Jean Hollis > Weber, and the woman who's just been shouted at for plugging her book, > too. But all these things tend to diminish the gap between commercial and > free software and to relocate the important difference between -- though > I am no longer sure what that is. I don't see anythng wrong with "commercial" free software. Freedom in software is about the code being open, not whether or not you can make money directly or indirectly from it. It is inevitable that large companies will become increasingly involved with free software so there will be a commercial side to things, its just that the commercial models will not be predicated on license based monopolies. > I am trying to think about the question of where and under what > circumstances open sourcing stuff is a more efficient way to produce > software than the traditional method. Large commoditised products wherer clearly the profits from selling licenses are way higher than justified by the development costs. Look up Christensen on disruptive innovation. Its been discussed here at length over the year. If company/government A pays more in license fees for some commodity that the cost of developing that commodity its going to be vulnerable to open source because it makes no economi sense to pay more for licensing that it costs to just share in the development. The mechanism for companies and governments to share in that development cost is just being shaken out. Sun are probably paying more for developing OOo than would be the case if it gave the code to a foundation. However they then lose control and big corporates aren't used to doing that. IN the longer term I guess if they don't do it someone sometime will fork the project - actually IBM and Novell already have. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
