> > Almost all Linux users I talk to about my proxy ask, "why don't you Open > > Source it." Because I want a fighting chance of making a buck on my work. > > It would be difficult for me to compete against the likes of Red Hat, who > > would gladly take my work and sell to IBM themselves. > > You say yourself that most of the people who attended the conference > were working in government, so it would be a poor assumption that *all* > of Europe is 100% pro-OSS. Take SAP for example. Their enterprise > software only runs on Windows; I don't see them racing to enter > partnerships with Novell/SuSE anytime soon. > > The phrase that seems to apply here comes from the aforementioned "Magic > Cauldron" essay: > > "... software is largely a service industry operating under the > persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing > industry." > > This is the tact that IBM (evil though they may be, they serve as good > examples of this business model) takes and is succeeding at. It implies > both that the attempt to sell a word processor *application* as if it > were a physical word processor piece of hardware is not ineffective > under OSS, but that the concept will eventually be defeated in the > commercial, closed-source world as well.
That's a darn good way of presenting the argument that I haven't though of before. Why cannot the same thing be said of the music industry as well though...? Both present a copyright as being equivalent in value to a physical object... whether it's code that you want to execute again and again, or a song that you'll want to listen to again and again. > > Those are just a few of my thoughts on the matter. YMMV. > > Tim > > _______________________________________________ > RLUG mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
