Re: [Fsfe-uk] Cheats!

[Shane M. Coughlan]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

David M wrote:
> On the one hand, you have $BIG_GOV or $MEGA_CORP, who believe that any
> problem can be solved by throwing (or withholding!) money at (from) it,
> on the other hand, you have $CRAZY_INTERNET_STARTUP (Yahoo, Google, etc)
> who started on shoestring budgets and so instinctively went the OSS
> route, scaling up and scaling up and eventually becoming big enough to
> start contributing things back to the pool..

I would suggest that the situation is perhaps more to do with task
usefulness.  When a large company needs to buy software, they need a
support package.  It's not good enough to have an active community.
They need someone they can call when the system goes down, and they need
someone who can promise to fix it.  They also need certification on the
stability and security of a system according to XYZ standards (like the
famous orange books in the USA).  FOSS has a problem with offering
support, and offering a transition path that looks assured to allow
productivity to continue relatively unhindered.  The situation is
improving, but it'll going to take a long time before FOSS
infrastructure can match something like Microsoft.

Yahoo! and Google directly profit from using FOSS.  Effectively they are
getting products for nothing, and that's really useful when they need to
raise their profiles for jumpy shareholders.  Microsoft is under a lot
less pressure that way.

Shane

- --
Shane Martin Coughlan
e: address@hidden
m: +447773180107
w: www.shaneland.co.uk
- ---
Projects:
http://mobility.opendawn.com    http://gem.opendawn.com
http://enigmail.mozdev.org      http://www.winpt.org
- ---
OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3-cvs-3991: (MingW32)

iQCVAwUBQ+Pq59wG3M95JPpzAQh4HgP/cj99xlnZVoh18CbwUcFhCRiK1AaYnRSW
umlVf3F72Tp36Y6rVpq6W8AO0dHkyGuWQlN+wQRFL4/pbYLMcUJotQXua7qOJVtO
nrvp75FF/NuGoL2CHug8AOzNwHnsEDQNnDJz4ixK13GmzZC0/Ihx0NhKmSBS0qwO
DN3tRVNCsQ4=
=jmLL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----