On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Vijay Patil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> More interesting question is, how a company (especially in India) > realizes that it benefited (saved cost) from free software, by X > amount. If that amount it significant then they might want (should?) > to use some fraction of it to contributing back (sponsoring a free > software project, a conference, employee time for creating user > documentation/tutorials etc.), to ensure that they continue to benefit > in future or just out of good will. For same reasons a company might > want to donate to Wikipedia. > Very very interesting. Please add to the possible models that can be used by an OSS community in India to keep a project going. Indians are generally accustomed to grab-what-you-can-free-beer only. A model where the money/resources/time gets channelized towards the development of the product works best. Two models I think (would) work 1. Lets say there's a firm A that needs a specific solution and oss community O An intermediary foss org ( non-profit ? ) mediates and improves transfer of resources in a cash-or-kind model from A to O. I don't know of any community operating in such a fashion in India. Sourceforge is currently favoring such a model. Please correct me if am wrong. 2. A firm A that has product that requires a layer of OSS based s/w fosters the dev of the OS around their product. This is a typical model of the non-evil corps that support a lot of the development. In effect I feel there's a lot to be done to improve smb/org perception towards the "brand-value" of ppl working in oss domain and about "give back". Is there any effort currently ongoing in this direction already ? A copyright-like model is worst at best i.e subsidizing the cost of dev by a "development tax". regards, C -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: ([email protected]) List Information: http://plug.org.in/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
