On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 21:10 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > o One cannot make money with free software > > The FSF, the OpenBSD project and RedHat are examples of the contrary.
Respectfully, this is not precise. Neither FSF nor OpenBSD are for-profit organizations. Even a casual read of the RedHat 10Q and 10K filings reveals that RedHat consistently *loses* money on software, and that their revenue strategy is based on generating money through support and upgrade agreements. In fact, RedHat did not show a profitable year until very recently, and it is very clear from their filings that the profit was based entirely on support revenue. For a long time, it wasn't clear that this was going to work, and the filings clearly identified this as the most important investor risk for potential buyers of redhat shares. The MySQL people have a similar model. So yes: you can make money in this business, but not on the free software per se. >From a business perspective, the risk of free software is that your competitor can use your code against you. The benefit of free software is that your competitor cannot undercut you on price, which makes you very very hard to dislodge from your market position unless you screw up pretty badly. shap _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
