I vote for the 'proprietery is evil' camp.
A business spends on capital investment, salaries & wages and other expenses
(marketing etc) and earns by selling their products
A. How a OSS company can pay developers?
1. When a company starts developing open source software they get an
existing code base FREE. Without that they would be investing big money to
buil the base of their software.
2. Now, the company can afford to give away modifications since their
initial investment is low compared to a closed source company.
3. The exact numbers can be debated, but overall the salaries reaching the
developers should be more or less similar in both the cases.
A business failing or being successful depends on many other factors than
whether their model is closed source or open source.
B. Then, why OSS model is better?
With OSS model we are not reinventing the wheel. By openly sharing already
developed ideas and codebase we free up resources for improvements. This
benefits everyone.
C. What will happen if every business works on OSS? No software will be
developed?
The model will be everyone working on their part of code which interests
them most and take from others as needed. Money will be made by SELLING
packaged software with your logo (you can do it under GPL) and providing
support, customization, user training etc.
Today the resources of the industry are wasted on repeated efforts on the
same work.
D. Why there are success stories of OSS businesses as closed source has,
like Microsoft etc?
Open Source model by its nature can not and will not produce
multi-billion-dollar-profit-making enterprises. OSS world will be populated
by small/medium sized enterprized working closely with customers on niche
areas.
Closed source model played its part in evolving software industry. With the
advent of internet that lost its relevance, and is being slowly replaced by
the OSS model. This is what I feel.
Reiser committing a crime and/or Linus trying to enforce a trademark are
not relevant in my opinion.
Best regards,
Ma Sivakumar
On 10/13/06, Bharathi Subramanian <sbharathi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
IIRC the big 3 viz TCS, Infosys and Wipro (among others) wanted
software patents in India! I dont think they said so publicly
I am NOT sure about India companies. But in the last week
OutLook(Weekly Mag) acticle M$ is says "Software Patents only can
help India to grow in Software field". It is 2 Page trap from M$.
Bye :)
--
Bharathi S
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