Arnulf,
Excellent soap box speech. I'd love you to put it on a web page
somewhere so that I can reference it next time this topic comes up. A
wiki might be good so that we can collectively tweak it (as you suggest).
Arnulf Christl wrote:
Howard Butler wrote:
On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into
the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra
credibility and marketing reach.
Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the
public domain and give them away for free for "extra credibility"?
What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an
intensive training session?
Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past
years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material
openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even
helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several
levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details
below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster
and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for
example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give
back our 2Ct contribution.
To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases
in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct
categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts
* Students
* Professionals
Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having
course material released under an open and free license. These are: *
Clients (~users, as categorized above) * Creators (for example the
WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce "Intellectual Property") * the
FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training
material (here MapServer and PostGIS).
A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but
unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to
explain the dependencies.
1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our
courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses
themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it
would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to
material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding
FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over
another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for
the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what
those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but
unquestionably there.
2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do
not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the
contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position
where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask -
Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders
can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also
enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it
is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen
because universities and educational personnel are still in the late
sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to
be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced
by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course
material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat
it as "Intellectual Property" you will be the only idiot who invests
keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give
(FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)?
3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a
problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These
are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try
and learn by themselves with freely available material because they
have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain
it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If
they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us anyway.
All folks from these three groups will see who created the course
material and will memorize them as the experts on the topic. The GNU
FDL license has a clause where invariant sections can be defined,
typically this could be the front page and back cover, there you can
find the authors, company logo and web site links or the creators'
individual address, contacts. Link to the repository where the
document is maintained, mailing list or whatever you want to advertise
as important for this publication.
Therefore our competitors who offer the same training courses with our
material (Outrageous! My "Property") always advertise us as the real
real experts. Who're
