Hello,This sounds like an interesting idea for end of life or mature products. It reminds of the land trusts that exist all over the US. The point of the land trust is for long time owners of farms or other largely undeveloped parcels to give up or sell their development rights in order to preserve the land as is.
I am taking the deliberate risk of starting another flame war but I think that URL might be a interesting idea. I like this group's ability as sounding board but sometimes it is just a little bit too volatile.
Todd Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/17/HNostep_1.html
Since the we can assume that the development costs of word perfect are no longer on Corel's books, then by putting WP into this escrow plan with sales threshold on it, they would hope to recover some value at least equal to what they would get trying to sell the rights to the product on the market (which since open office came on the scene, this value is probably very low).
If however, one has just developed a product in the traditional commercial model the only ROI comes from the large sales volume (if ever) should the product make it up the adoption cycle. That means if you still thought you could make it with this product your sales volume would be set very high before you turned open source. Therefore it seems likely to me that this service will act a 'life boat' kind of value preservation for products no longer at play in the commercial markets.
