Re: Debian goes big business?
Just my $0.02:
As a case study; up here in Canada we have an outdoor outfitters
store called Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC). It is similar in
structure to DUA that has been proposed in that to shop there you
have to buy a five dollar membership, but with that membership you
gain voting privileges for electing the board of directors. You can
own as many shares as you want, but you only get one vote. Most
of the coop's revenue is re-invested in environmental causes,
expansion, and manufacturing it's own line of outdoor equipment. I
shop there all the time because I know they'll only put equipment on
the shelves that they _know_ works well, because it's in their
mandate. They also have a mandate to avoid products
manufactured in countries with dubious human rights records as well
as invest a set percentage of all revenues in environmental
preservation/restoration.
I believe this example has two relevant points:
It demonstrates that it is possible to have a money-making
organization that can have paid staff selling a product(s), but not
stray from it's morals. Partly because it's mandated, and partly
because of the organization of the directorships, but mostly because
greed is essentially not a motivation for the company.
It also demonstrates that this type of organization can be successful.
MEC has grown from six people in a tent on a mountainside
complaining about shoddy equipment, to a nation wide chain of
stores that are continually expanding and improving in quality and
diversity. All this while in a heavily competitive field against
corporations such as LL Bean, Totem, Patagonia, REI and others.
Some urls I highly suggest people read:
The MEC rules of (co)operation:
http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/mecrules.htm
The MEC mission statement:
http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/mission.htm
And the brief history of MEC:
http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/history.htm
I think a coop approach similar to this would be beneficial to Debian
because it would allow the developers to get paid for their work,
allow Debian to grow into a more mainstream OS (depending on the
mandate of the organization), while still allowing the end user to
have a lot of control over the condition of the product.
IMHO, the beautiful thing about this is that being open source, if it
doesn't work it's possible to just take the code and run, as it were.
MBG
--------------------------------
"Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much
bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally
stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so
big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.
Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge
is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
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