-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 David M wrote: > On the one hand, you have $BIG_GOV or $MEGA_CORP, who believe that any > problem can be solved by throwing (or withholding!) money at (from) it, > on the other hand, you have $CRAZY_INTERNET_STARTUP (Yahoo, Google, etc) > who started on shoestring budgets and so instinctively went the OSS > route, scaling up and scaling up and eventually becoming big enough to > start contributing things back to the pool..
I would suggest that the situation is perhaps more to do with task usefulness. When a large company needs to buy software, they need a support package. It's not good enough to have an active community. They need someone they can call when the system goes down, and they need someone who can promise to fix it. They also need certification on the stability and security of a system according to XYZ standards (like the famous orange books in the USA). FOSS has a problem with offering support, and offering a transition path that looks assured to allow productivity to continue relatively unhindered. The situation is improving, but it'll going to take a long time before FOSS infrastructure can match something like Microsoft. Yahoo! and Google directly profit from using FOSS. Effectively they are getting products for nothing, and that's really useful when they need to raise their profiles for jumpy shareholders. Microsoft is under a lot less pressure that way. Shane - -- Shane Martin Coughlan e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] m: +447773180107 w: www.shaneland.co.uk - --- Projects: http://mobility.opendawn.com http://gem.opendawn.com http://enigmail.mozdev.org http://www.winpt.org - --- OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3-cvs-3991: (MingW32) iQCVAwUBQ+Pq59wG3M95JPpzAQh4HgP/cj99xlnZVoh18CbwUcFhCRiK1AaYnRSW umlVf3F72Tp36Y6rVpq6W8AO0dHkyGuWQlN+wQRFL4/pbYLMcUJotQXua7qOJVtO nrvp75FF/NuGoL2CHug8AOzNwHnsEDQNnDJz4ixK13GmzZC0/Ihx0NhKmSBS0qwO DN3tRVNCsQ4= =jmLL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
