On Tue, 2003-07-08 at 07:46, Dustin Puryear wrote: > > > >As a free developer, I can put the system together at no cost besides my > >time. If what I put together was worth using, I could get paid to put it > >in place. What I charge would be mostly for hardware used and development > >time. Sure, others would > > Exactly! > > So someone pays for your development time. Who? A single client? If it > takes you or a team of developers several months or more to develop > software that could conceivable be mass-marketed then there is an > inefficiency here. A single client is paying for something that a larger > base of clients would be willing to pay for. > > So how do we solve this problem? >
So, your problem is you have a collection of several potential users of a piece of software that has yet to be written. On their own, each of these users cannot afford to hire enough developers to fully write the software they need. However, given that they can pool their money together, they can afford to hire a team of developers to write the software with all the features they'd like. But who owns the software? Does the developer? Does one of the companies? Do _all_ of the companies? When one of the companies wants to make some changes to it, where do they go? What if the developers are gone or too busy? What if there's a feature that only one of the users wants to add? Well, when the software is written from the ground up as Open Source, then there's only one question. 'Where can we find someone that can work on this software?' Easy enough to solve, especially if the software was written using open standards and best practices for documentation. What I've described may not seem be in the best interest for the average developer. But I think anyone who actually _uses_ software would think it's best for them, and for the software. A lot of software houses will try to lock their customers into using only them, thus trying to sell down the merits of Open Source software, it's only natural. But I think there's a lot of people, even on this list, who have seen software that's written by companies who are now defunct, or at least unwilling to support applications that they've written. In some cases, software that the customer does not even have access to the source code to. > This question just keeps coming up. Everyone keeps trying to argue the > merits of open source software. That's not my question. What was your question again? -Tim
