Re: free vs commercial
On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 07:52:29PM -0800, ken keanon wrote:
>
>[...]
>
> Ron Johnson and Ken West touched on an important
> point. Whether h/w manufacturers and s/w developers
> will come out with Linux-compatible product is a
> business decision. One factor to consider would be the
> market size i.e. the Linux user-base. This is a
> chicken-and-egg situation. Moreover, very few
> companies would want to use their paid developers to
> development products that would be used freely.
Hang on a sec. Hardware manufacturers are selling hardware, not
drivers. Using their software products "freely" without having
bought their hardware products in the first place doesn't sound
like the sort of thing many people would undertake. Cornering the
linux market might, however, seem an attractive proposition from
the manufacturer's point of view.
Am I talking nonsense?
David
--
David Jardine
"Running Debian GNU/Linux and
loving every minute of it." -Sacher M.
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