Re: Mostly free software...
[ once again, a mail for debian-discuss ]
On Wed, Mar 31, 1999 at 03:08:51AM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> David Welton <davidw@master.debian.org> writes:
> > Umm, I don't *want* to help my competitors. Maybe, if it's not a
> > core product, it won't be that important, but, if I spend a lot of
> > money and time paying someone to develop really nice code, from
> > scratch, that is central to my business, I'll be damned if I'll
> > hand it over to the competition for free.
> Chances are that the savings in development and maintenance costs
> accrued by using the free software model would far outweigh any
> brief competitive advantage you might enjoy by not freeing the
> source. If the software really gave you a competitive edge, you can
> be sure that it won't take the competition long to work out how your
> doing it, and write their own.
At which point you free yours, undercutting them, being the first one
to have an open source product:-> It is at this point that your code
has become more of a comodity, something that many people have
implemented, so it is probably an advantage to free it.
There are obviously a lot of benefits to free software, but I think
that there are places where you are going to have trouble making money
off of it. Therefore, you won't be able to convince businesses to
release their code as free software.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next few
years, as businesses start to see some of the advantages to be gained
from free code.
I think it might be interesting to examine some hypothetical cases, to
see where the advantages and disadvantages are. I think it's a given
that 'infrastructure' is better off being free. Where the line
between 'infrastructure' and 'extras' is, is hard to find, sometimes.
I think until recently, free software really didn't have much to talk
about in the realm of gui's, but now, with the gimp, gnome, kde, et
all, the bar has been raised in that field. I think the same thing is
about to happen with desktop app kinds of things, like word
processors.
The question then, in my mind, is how to be on that 'cutting edge', be
free, and make money at it. Is it possible? I mean, if you are just
reimplementing something someone else has already done, why bother
trying to eke out some cash from it. If, however, you have come up
with a relatively novel idea, how can you get the capital to spend a
year implementing it, if at the end of that time, you plan to give it
away?
Anyway, time to head home... ciao,
--
David N. Welton | Fortune rota volvitur - descendo minoratus
davidw@prosa.it | alter in altum tollitur - nimis exaltatus
http://www.efn.org/~davidw | rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!
www.debian.org - www.prosa.it | nam sub axe legimus - Hecubam reginam
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