Will people willingly "put money in Netscape's pocket" by helping
to extend Navigator open source?
At the Open Source Developer's Day conference, Bob Young told the
audience that the more he gave Linux away, "the more money Red Hat
made". Perhaps its just my US-capitalistic mindset, but this was a
very difficult business concept for me to grasp. Not that it wasn't
admirable or anything; it was just rather counter-intuitive.
Well, it looks like it is not an isolated phenomenon:
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> The Internet Advertising Discussion List
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> Giving It All Away
> What happens when a travel publisher puts its books on the Web for free?
>
> Three years ago Rough Guides, a travel guidebook publisher based in London,
> took a bold, unprecedented step: The company placed
> the full text of several of its most popular travel guides on the Web. It
> was giving away the milk for free; but who would buy the cow?
>
> "We took an enormous gamble when we put all of our content on the Web for
> free," says Jean Marie Kelly, Rough Guides' associate
> publisher, who oversees the company's online efforts. "Our content is our
> bread and butter. Only a handful of companies in the English-speaking world
> have the amount of travel content we have. And for years we've known a safe,
> proven way to make money off that content placing it between covers and
> selling it as books."
>
> But the results are now in, and they seem definitive: The cow's got nothing
> to worry about. Every year since Rough Guides launched its site, book sales
> have increased at least 20 percent.
>
> Full article: The Industry Standard
> http://www.thestandard.com/articles/article_print/0,1454,2175,00.html
>
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