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Commercialization of Linux
m3.142 writes "Author J.S. Kelly in his LinuxWorld article says [summarized]
'In 1999, Linux became the Next Big Thing. Linux grew in market share and mindshare, in users and in servers, in support from hardware companies, software companies, and software vendors, in media coverage and in stock valuation. J.S. Kelly isn't convinced that the people who so badly wanted Linux to become the Next Big Thing knew precisely what they were wishing for, and thinks they may be in for an unwelcome lesson ...'"
I want software that doesn't suck. It's as simple as that.
Open source, while it has philsopical points that I think are important, main attraction is that it is the best long term means of accomplising that - for me at least.
Who cares is Linux is just the current "big thing", and in a years time all these companies that have jumped on the bandwagon have gone?
Provided they have open-sourced their stuff, the source will still be around to integrate (licence allowing) into things that we/I will find useful.
Not only that, but no longer do we need to put up with crappy software and feel powerless to do anything about it. Hate Windows? Contribute to Gnome/KDE. Think ASP sux? There's PHP for you.
Remember back in say '93 or '94 how bad Windows 3.11 was? Remember the first time you tried Linux and - after installing everything you could find, then deinstalling half of it - that it still didn't crash!
That's what it is about for me. I don't care if all these companies abandon Linux - provided the source is still around, no company can afford to put out crappy software anymore.
The business community works by making it interesting to make money. Regardless of how it is spun, in the end everyone needs money.
The reason why many open source projects work and continue to survive is because they offer
1) better quality
2) respect the business community
3) listen to their clients
Here are examples of this in action, Linux, Apache and Perl. Each of these three projects do not attempt to force the world to open source. They do their thing and let the business community be as it is.
To be quite honest I would think a VAT or Open Source society tax should be started. Companies that profit from Open Source should be required to donate some money to the Open Source community. The Open Source community would then spread that money to developers working on Open Source projects.
I know this sounds socialist, but I think the Open Source community as a whole would benefit. I would even ammend the GPL as follows.
"If you intend to not distribute the sources to this project, then you are required to donate a reasonable amount of the profts back into the Open Source community."
As much as the Open Source community hates this, but it makes a business of Open Source. Instead this will make interesting for the business community to use the vast number of sources available. And if the business community does use the sources then the Open Source community will benefit. The Open Source community can then continue and do their favourite thing, hack at code...
I think it is a very attractive business model. A small business could compete against the big players. To be quite frank this is a great way of breaking the hold of the big software companies on the software community.
If you think that this will only attract leeches and pirates, think again. Developing a product is one thing. Making it stable, creating effective documentation, creating a marketing campaign, providing extensive support is quite a bit of work and should not be underestimated. And as we all know, this part of the work sucks!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
How's this for commercialization: Hot off the business wire: VA/Linux is buying Andover.net for 0.425 shares of VA per share of Andover. This is good news for me, being that I like VA enough to own them and already bought into Andover at 37....
The author clearly has some facts just plain wrong.
He claims Andreesen used the Mosaic code to "float netscape". Wrong. The Mosaic code was, in fact, the most valuable piece of code around at the time. It was licensed - to Microsoft. They then gave it away making it totally worthless to the people who invented the graphical browser.
Netscape rewrote the browser de novo.
Kelly makes other errors as well, but he misses the important commercialization point made at Linus' recent keynote. Big companies have done a LOT to make linux end user friendly in a short period of time, They've done a lot of menial bug chasing - the kind of code writing that is easiest done by paying someone. Redhat and VA linux especially do a lot. SGI is bringing some nfs work to linux, as well as the best file system in existence. IBM brought its (closed source) Java implementation. And on and on.
Yeah, big business is really affecting linux. Just not as JS Kelly thinks it is. Maybe he should actually try using it sometime.