“Nick Ryan” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> As much as I think Gates and Ballmer, being techies at heart, could be
> convinced personally that doing this would be the right thing, I don’t
> see Microsoft Legal or Microsoft the Corporation being able to
> understand that making the source code visible != giving away the source
> code.
>
> –
> Nick Ryan (MVP for DDK)
>
When I worked on the DEC VMS O/S, they had an interesting way of letting you
see the source code, but not allowing you to easily incorporate large hunks
of it into your own code. The O/S was totally proprietary, but sources to
most modules were supplied on microfiche for a nominal fee. (Remember
microfiche?) No machine search capabilities, but useful nonetheless. Not
exactly open source, but helpful.
Of course, DEC made (or tried to make) its money from selling hardware, and
the software was something you needed to include to sell the box. Today,
it’s different. Nowadays, you can almost give away PCs and sell the
software and make a tidy profit.
Carl (aka “old fart”).
Well, this sounds nice, good, positive, upbeat, win-win, and all, but I like
fact. Who, what company or individual, has made money in software products
on linux? Not service revenue, not hardware revenue, but who has actually
generated software product revenue in linux successfully and over time? I
haven’t heard of them myself, and I would love to be educated here. Not,
what could possibly be, but what is. My guess is it can’t be done, and no
one has presented fact that would contradict this. Thomas’s question stands
from what I can tell.
–
Bill McKenzie
Compuware Corporation
Watch your IRPs/IRBs/URBs/SRBs/NDIS pkts with our free WDMSniffer tool:
http://frontline.compuware.com/nashua/patches/utility.htm
“Ray Trent” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
> > How does a (very small) software development house make money under
Open
> > Source licenses?"
> >
> > (I am serious about needing an answer to that question)
>
> As far as I can tell, open source doesn’t preclude one from making
> money by writing software for someone else. It only precludes then
> turning around and selling it to a bunch of other people.
>
> Depending on what kind of small software house you run, I’m not sure
> what difference open-sourcing the results of contracts would have on
> your revenues. Perhaps it would scare off some clients, but perhaps it
> would attract others that want to see/maintain the code themselves
> after the project is done.
>
> In fact, you might (possibly… don’t hold your breath) get a bunch of
> free work done on your code, which you could then reuse to develop the
> next contract project for the next customer. FWIW, my company hasn’t
> yet needed to expend resources developing a Linux driver for our
> products because it’s already been done for us by 3rd parties.
>
> I’m pretty neutral about the free software community (which is
> different from open source, but that’s a different flamewar). If you
> don’t want to reuse their code, or you aren’t able to because you need
> to be able to use a more restrictive license, then don’t.
>
> The only harm I can possibly see is that they are competing with
> people trying to do it for a living. Frankly, I’m not too worried
> about that at this point… Most of the stuff they have produced isn’t
> stuff that anyone could develop and then charge for anyway.
> –
> …/ray..
>
>
>
It is interesting that the Open Source community is trying to pass laws that
require open source be purchased. One of the leaders of this movement is
Red Hat (gee they won’t get anything out of this). The other leader is a
professor Bruce Perens, he has told his CS students that they may be able to
find jobs in support, but otherwise software development will be free (and
these poor guys unpaid). Of course he is a significant inovator being the
“inventor” (his words) in 2001 of a kernel driver bug detection system that
catches buffer overruns (it uses guard pages, hmm anybody think of a system
that did that shortly before, of course they didn’t claim to invent it).
If open source is truly competitive they would not need to be trying to pass
these laws, or claiming to invent things that came long before them.
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
From: "Bill McKenzie:
Well, this sounds nice, good, positive, upbeat, win-win, and all, but I
like
fact. Who, what company or individual, has made money in software
products
on linux? Not service revenue, not hardware revenue, but who has actually
generated software product revenue in linux successfully and over time? I
haven’t heard of them myself, and I would love to be educated here. Not,
what could possibly be, but what is. My guess is it can’t be done, and no
one has presented fact that would contradict this. Thomas’s question
stands
from what I can tell.