On Saturday 11 July 2009, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote: > On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 11:09 AM, jtd<[email protected]> wrote: > > It is more about companies relying on legal innovation rather than > > business and technical innovation. > > Agreed. > > > In the case of FLOSS companies, the simple act of separating the closed > > bits on a different media, with whatever licence one deems fit, would > > remove all ambiguities. > > Fedora has a couple of packages which include branding into the > distro. Replacing them with generic branding packages is all it takes > to spin up a new distro based on Fedora. It is probably not as simple > in RHEL, but I am guessing it is simple enough for CentOS to exist. > > > Infact in this case making it mandatory to make an EXACT facsimile for > > copying and redistribution including the artwork, would ensure plenty of > > free publicity to RH. Why do you think companies handout freebies? > > What do you think Canonical is doing? It's very smart marketing by > > Canonical. > > And they're not making any profits yet. IIRC, this is what Red Hat was > doing in its earlier days and they just did not seem to be making > money despite all the mindshare. Businesses need money to survive, not > just mindshare.
It was just a matter of time to spread out sufficiently, and has absolutely nothing to do with (distro) licences. > > > What came to the top of my mind when i thought of ditching Debian? it was > > Canonical (mono in ubuntu is another story though). RH has been around > > longer, but IMO it's Canonical which has mindshare, by the simple act of > > encouraging copying. > > And as far as contributions go, you do not see too many Ubuntu > contributions upstream compared to Red Hat, IBM or even Novell. > Sustainability of FOSS is in upstream, not some distro. Are there stats about unpaid contributors becoming paid contributors after contribution v/s contributors who have been shifted from closed projects to FLOSS (and still being paid). Secondly what is the alternative available to the closed company and its apps? We know it's easy to produce code, but exceedingly hard to prevent bitrot. So original code contributions would IMO be more a requirement rather than an option. As each individual subsystem becomes a smaller part of the whole ecosystem, it will be a nightmare to keep things barely workable in a closed env. On a sort of related note, its the above reason that is causing M$ grief, and at the same time killing it slowly (rather than rapidly). M$ can innovate only at the rate of it's decay. If it innovates rapidly it will sink rapidly. If it does not innovate it sinks anyway by natural causes. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
