>Man. If FOSS is so great, how come *we* don't have all of that money >to do all of those things?
Very simple. Proprietary software is written for investors by non-users. FOSS, for the most part, is written by the customers for the customers. FOSS is written by the people that have "the itch that needs scratching", the community. Sometimes it is written by people who are providing a service (Red Hat, Novell, etc.) but just look at any service business....its "Exit Value" is typically 1.5 times revenue, versus a "Product Company" being 5 times revenue (or more). FOSS, by its very nature, limits profitability. People can not rely on making a product one time, and milking that investment hundreds or thousands or (in the case of Microsoft) millions of times. You are paid for your work, and are then expected to hand it back to the thousands who contributed before you. "We stand on the shoulders of giants who went before." Who loses in a true FOSS environment? The investors. They don't get to invest one dollar and make a million. It is more like investing a dollar and making a hundred.....ergo Wall Street hates us. And Wall Street has lots of connections on "K" street in Washington, D.C. Another set of losers? Patent Trolls. And not just the ones that buy patents without having a single thought in their minds, but the people that patent "obvious things" and hope that no one notices "prior art" until they have bludgeoned unsuspecting users for everything they have. Who else loses? IP Lawyers, because with proprietary code the first thing you need is a lawyer to negotiate the contract with the IP provider. With FOSS all you have to do to start a new business is pull down the code, and agree to certain principals when you use the code. No lawyers. No Trolls. No high-powered business negotiators. Gee, look who is on the staff of the International Intellectual Property Alliance: http://www.iipa.com/personnel.html SURPRISE, SURPRISE! Who wins in a true FOSS environment? The customer, who does not have to pay again and again for the code. Society in general, who finds that they can change the code to meet their needs, lowering costs, being more efficient, etc. They take that money they save and they do things like feeding their kids, paying their mortgage, buying their spouse something nice. It is hard for them to figure out they should be donating their money to protect their freedom. After all, that is what the government is supposed to be doing, right? Instead we have a "Supreme Court" that has just given the same rights to a corporation that a living, breathing, bleeding person has. So true FOSS companies that are profitable making FOSS are not "Microsoft profitable", because if they were, others would fork their products and compete with them. But WAIT, America! What is really happening here? Does FOSS really hurt our economy, or just distribute it differently? Does it mean that the small country of New Hampshire does not have to export as much of its money to the country of Redmond-Washington? Does having the source code for our software mean that we can actually fix the problems that are keeping us from moving forward? Does it mean that we can at last close the functionality gap between what we need and what we get, saving at least five BILLION dollars a day as a world economy?(1) The problem, you see, is that five BILLION dollars a day is spent five dollars at a time. If it was not, if it was concentrated and paid to someone (like a company), we could do the same things as the BSA and the "IIPA". I hope I have partially answered your question. There is actually a lot more to this, but I am tired tonight. But remember two things: o FOSS favors the common person o According to the book "Collapse", by Jack Diamond, in the collapse of economy the first people eaten were the chiefs and the priests. Warmest regards, maddog _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
