Andrew po-jung Ho wrote:
> This issue is well-discussed in psychiatry where it is felt that paying the
>psychiatrist
> enhances therapeutic benefit!
> Therefore, why not charge a reasonable fee for a superior (open source) medical
>information
> system?
>>
>
There is difference here, and it lies at the heart of most business models for open
source.
It is the difference between service and software goods. Paying for service is what
you do
when you pay the psychiatrist, but is not what you do when you pay for software. Open
source
is not a free system, no matter how you cut it. Someone must install, configure and
support
the collection of software and hardware, and there is no way one can imagine doing
that for
free.
Well, not exactly, the Microsoft model is you pay for the software and then you do all
the support yourself, and because you don't charge yourself, the service looks free!
Actually,
many Linux users have the same model, which is why they can't understand paying
Microsoft
a royalty for their software. But these are not the models widely used in business,
small
or large, where paying for trained expertise is considered a cost of business.
You pay for your accountant and lawyer and doctor, why not your IT costs? So the
issue becomes
not whether the software is free or not, but whether high quality support people are
available. IBM is directly answering that question by providing a high quality Linux
support
[EMAIL PROTECTED] on multiple platforms: Intel, RISC and Mainframe -
perfect scalability and world class
support - that makes Linux perfectly viable as an OS in data center type operations.
Furthermore, there has for a long time
been a small business class of market, where the hardware, OS and applications are
bundled
together and sold as a complete package. (this is sometimes called the VAR market)
The end user,
say a video rental chain or a small GP
office, buys the functionality and pays every year to keep that functionality running.
They
dont' care what the OS or software or even hardware is. It's the organization which
bundles
and sell's the function that cares: and they won't pay for an OS or for software if
they don't
have to.
