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Open Source Limitations?
_aargh writes "This ZDNet article by John Carroll makes the claim that open source is flawed because there isn't a way for programmers to earn money by developing open source software. It annoyed me so much that I wrote this response to it on the O'Reilly Network."
Why dont you get paid for your work on making software and still have it open source? Just because your getting paid doesn't mean the company that pays you has to close it.
Think of this:
1. You write software for company X.
2. You get paid.
3. Company X uses this software and makes money.
4. Company Y finds this software useful and adds to it.
5. Company X & Y are BOTH in a better position with spending the same amount.
This is similar to comparative advantage my economics teacher told me about. You and someone else can both work on something and because you each have a strength and weakness you two can come out both better.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
No, what I'm saying is, let's go out and find the biggest contributors to open source software, and also some big programmers at Microsoft. Then we hire them to continue writing open source software full time. I think we'd have just as good, or better results, then any corporate software out there.
People are willing to invest time in something they care about but they still need to make money. If you pay people who currently program open-source just as a hobby, to do it full time, you'd have excellent results.
When you charge for something that has zero marginal cost, you are limiting the number of people who can use it artificially, since there is no actual limit on how many people should be able to use it. It is an economic fact: when something has a zero marginal cost, it should not be charged for to be used, otherwise you are creating economic inefficiencies.
Steal this idea, amazon
This book explains it all.
Fortune 10 companies here, and of the 6 or 7 critical bugs I've seen during rollouts, only twice have I seen a software vendor with their ass on fire and hot enough to do a quick fix. Of the remaining times, they were still $8-22 million rollouts, and we either waited, or found workarounds. You could be King of Planet Earth, Emperor of the Milkyway Galaxy, and sit at the right side of the Throne of God, and still have to wait half the time, I think.
Hell, Micro$oft is a financial behemoth, and I can't think of a single piece of their software that is even half as reliable as some of the worst open source software.
My girlfriend insists on windows, so I upgraded her box to win2k... thought it was almost tolerable: rock solid for M$ crap. Then last weekend, it barfed up pieces of the sound card driver. She looks at me when I can't fix it, and says "I thought you were supposed to be some kind of computer expert". Sound card works in every one of my boxes I test it in, and her ISA slot works with the nic I threw in it. It is, without a doubt, windows' fault. It *ALWAYS* does this, just took awhile for win2k to show its true colors.
And now I have to read about people ranting that OSS just isn't suitable for enterprise solutions?