Ok, I think I see your point.  So, if Microsoft were to release all their code to 
public domaing aka open source, and just sell the support for it, and if they had made 
the same amount of money doing this, then they would be OK people?  In other words 
it's not the gobs of money but what they sold?

Sincerely,
Jim Ryan





-----Original Message-----
From:    Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent:    Wed, 28 Jun 2000 17:08:09 -0400 (EDT)
To:      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CC:      [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
Subject: Re: Free software in business (was maddog speaks)


On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, jim t.p. ryan wrote:

> Derek, 
> 
> I'm still confused.  How was sendmail and Apache originally created?  
> What do those people do for a living?  How do they make their money?  

Sendmail was originally written by Eric Allman while he was a student At
UCB.  He now makes his living selling support for Sendmail Pro, which is
the OSS sendmail software with an add-on GUI configuration tool.

Apache, I don't know, but I suspect it has a similar story.  I'd suspect
that by now Ken Coar has already answered this...

> I'm not being a wise guy here, I really want to understand how
> software would work in a completly open source world.  I mean if I'm a
> programmer by trade and I want to feed my family how do I do it in
> this model?  Maybe I'm being overly simplistic but I like the concept,
> I just don't fully get it.

Sell support for your software, not the software.  That's essentially what
RedHat does, that's what Sendmail Inc. does, and that is what most other
OSS vendors do.


-- 
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 


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