On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, Dan O'Reilly wrote:
> Why is it stupid? Maybe usury, but surely they have a right to charge what
> they want for their products, don't they? The thing that kills me about this
> whole "free software" thing is that people seem to expect me, as a business
> owner, to invest literally hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of $$$ to
> develop software, betting my company on it, then give it away just because
> people don't want to pay. Where's the incentive, then, to develop quality
> software, if people are to force you to give it up with no hope of recovering
> your development costs?
I don't know about other people but I certainly don't expect that. I
view open source as being more akin to the stone soup model of
development. Everyone contributes pieces and someone integrates it
into the whole. for example, I'm developing significant IP behind
speech driven programming techniques. Programmers that haven't been
injured (and some that are) are helping me implement the IP. we all
contribute something and we can all benefit from the whole. I'm
giving all my IP away because a good speech user interface is too
important for anyone company to play "dog in the manger". we're giving away
the code again because it's the right thing to do.
from economic side, if you're looking at solely recovering development
costs, there are other models. For example, customers could pay for
"their share" of the development costs or they could pay for specific
bug fixes if they needed that fixed done now. Auction techniques
could be used to determine what feature should be added for the next
release. If you don't like auctions, you can use the PBS begging
model. One can sell additional services (support, consulting,
training, etc.) to pay for essential development as well.
when you leverage to product development off of existing code bases or
Toolkits, you'll find your costs of development drop significantly.
If you're forced to recreate or re-implement useful tools, development
costs go through the roof.
>
> The other argument, that of "it's just mathematical equations", is equally
> as farcical. Books are just collections of words, yet people copyright them.
> Surely words should be in the public domain, right? If it's that easy, then
> expend your own resources and write your own algorithms. If you build a
> better mousetrap...
not exactly. Using your analogy, if books are just collections of
words, what would a world be like if people patented books. They'd be
a single author for mysteries, science-fiction, technical books,
etc. and they can use patents to keep other authors from expressing
their views and publishing their books.
if on the other hand you truly believe that patents are appropriate to
protecting software, you might consider doing a patent search if you
use linked lists in your code. you're probably in violation of one of
the over 400 patents featuring linked lists. check the IBM patent
search engine. Try looking up your favorite data structure there.
> Now, I'm not saying a $100k fee is fair, by any stretch of the
> imagination. But by the same token, it *IS* their software to
> license. Just because someone thinks it should be free, isn't any
> kind of a good reason to MAKE it free.
understood and I can even agree somewhat. The problem with software
and business process patents is that they are usually based on prior
art, too broad and are used to create monopolies.
--- eric
Eric S. Johansson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This message was composed almost entirely using NaturallySpeaking
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