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as a digital good that is virtually free to replicate, competition in "selling" software will lead to zero, regardless of whether it is FLOSS or closed, it all depends on marginal cost which is $0 for software (thanks bertrand).

One would be wiser to focus his business model not on the software, but anything else that depends on it, which no one but the person who developed the software, would do it as good.

Support and customization are all good options, but not all types of software will require it. So it will depend on how the software is put to use.

As things are, hardware companies are set to be the most to benefit from FLOSS, which means they might be the ones who will employ FLOSS developers in the future. This is mostly because they are selling the hardware which depends on FLOSS. Why not sell an optimized system that uses your product? (mythTV folks .. I hope you are reading this)

Selling software as a service might also be a viable option, with all the interest suddenly for computing in the cloud (am I the only one who doesn't see this idea as novel?) Where you host the service or application you develop for anyone who is not interested in setting the infrastructure up.

To sum up, software in and of itself has no value, combining it in a way with other valuable products or services would yield superadditive value.

Don't forget Switzerland

No, actually quite normal.

There are as far as I encountered only two kinds of people. Either they're interested in the world around them or not. Either they have an open mind or have a narrow horizon and call it a point of view.

That's actually surprisingly (or not so) independent of the country they come from.

But then, what do you expect when people learn from TV and learn it wrong? And I'm kinda scared of the French imperialism.

Seriously now. It's no shame not to know that Ikea is from Sweden and not from Finland.

Here are some links for the interested:

Music and books
http://questioncopyright.com/

Patents
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm

Network economy
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.ph p/Main_Page

Collection p2p politics
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/

Software
http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/20 07/computer-2007-article.html

IP economics
http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/

For a really useful and insightfult article on Open Source Economics, I thought Bruce Perens' article was the best.... no catchy graphs, tables and colours, but still very thoughtful and well-researched.

http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/20 07/computer-2007-article.html

IBM has nothing to do with the origins of 'Open Source' or Free software for that matter.. they just tagged along.

With version 2.0, UML is going to make an enormous step towards visual application design. Several ambiguities are resolved. Class diagrams and OCL are now built on precise foundations (set theory and predicate logics) [1] -- instead of having most of the semantics described in plain English; the fundations of other diagram types were also formalized.

The advantages of more precise models are that they can better form the basis for code generation [2] or even direct interpretation [3,4]. In contrast to earlier approaches to code generation, a common standard now allows interchange between different tools (at least to some extent).

Here, one of the main advantages is probably not "point and click", but a higher level of abstraction: current programming languages simply do not support high level diagram elements--such as bidirectional associations--as first class members. Things that can be expressed by simple means in class diagrams and OCL expressions become multi-line code in a regular programming languages[5]. Of course, building on UML directly also may resolve maintenance problems such as inconsistencies between diagrams and the actual code.

1. http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3897228424
2. http://www.omg.org/mda/
3. http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/20 01/oopsla-2001.html
4. http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/auto?self=$dq74rv vv
5. http://i11www.ilkd.uni-karlsruhe.de/~baar/oclworks hopUml03/papers/10_combined_model_processing.pdf

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