On Thursday 31 August 2006 05:01 pm, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote: > On 8/31/06, jtd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Besides he very convienetly forgets the value of everbody else's > > contribution - ideas, code, debugging, publicity. > > I think he's complaining that FOSS essentially attacks the idea of > software as a *product* which can be sold like a tangible product > such as a car, stereo, etc. Businesses thriving on FOSS (Trolltech, > RH, Suse, Novell, etc) essentially give away the product for free > and charge for the service. > > So if FOSS becomes THE mainstream way, the idea of *software > product* in the earlier sense (write once, sell many times) will > die.
It wont IF the software has such unique characteristics that it cannot be duplicated / improved by someone else. Basically sit in a cave and write code that takes care of all variations that your market could possibly demand while ensuring it is bug free and affordable. Games are one such (and again peversely a succesful game will be duplicated). Any thing more serious and the coder is conning himself into believing that he can deliver something useful. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
