On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 08:40, Wayne Wilson wrote: > What's at stake is the business model.
Very true. That's how things have worked throughout history. > ON the one hand, > what companies want is on-going service revenue, on the > other hand, they also want up-front capital revenue. FOSS > really forgoes the latter. Not in all cases. There are many that write custom apps for hire and under the agreement the code is released under an open source license. > And in the process, it forgoes > most chances of a company reducing customer churn via either > high capitalization or lock-in. IN a service business, > customer churn is your worst enemy and if you only have the > quality of your service to protect you, you really can't > take your eye off the customer. And that is not a bad thing. Not for anyone involved in the relationship. You'll still lose your bottom 10% of customers to cheaper alternatives but that is really good for your business if done correctly and replaced by a newer higher end 10%. For an easy & entertaining read on the latest "discovery" items from SCO see: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031119041719640 Cheers, Tim
