Businessweek Covers Linuxworld

MadFarmAnimalz writes "BusinessWeek has coverage of Linuxworld up, and it makes interesting reading in places. Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things." I'll be out there tomorrow for the Golden Penguin Bowl, as well as judging exhibitors. Busy day.

Comments

Slashdotted already?

[grub]

LinuxWorld was a huge success!

Bob Young gave out 23 free red velvet fedoras. He commented that he would have liked to have given out more but being that RedHat only made $300K last year "times were rough".

Across the hall, 6 gentlemen from the RepoDepot were clearing out the Mandrakesoft booth.

VA Software had a good showing, several dozen slashdot fans shared pizza with Cowboy Neal and CommanderTaco was demoing a beta version of his GPL spelling software.

Linuxworld 2003 news links

[dietlein]

Computerworld

Cnet

Internetnews

Infoworld

And, of course, Microsoft Watch.

Re:What's there to celebrate?

[tewfik]

is that pessimistic or what? Those are sad headlines, but Linux future is being readied in the background. Indeed in todays world economy the fresh money linux companies need to survive is to come from the formerly-3rd-world countries. These recon there is no point in using expensive software and are switchig steadily to open source solutions. The same applies for the tech certs. We expect there will be far more people certified RHCE or LPI than MSCE and the like in the near future.
One never knows where the salvation is to come from.

Open-source ethics

[Neophytus]

Amongst things touched upon are the open-source business model, how vendors will be tempted into locking in customers into their offerings, and other things
Part of the good nature of the open source community is the sense of freeness and sharing. Locking people into certain 'offerings' and related things is completely against these values. All the hassle of open source without the benefits of the community that surrounds you - rather pointless if you ask me.

Open Source Business Model

[DeadSea]

I have quite a few bugs in Mozilla that I have reported, or for which I have voted, so I get quite a bit of email from Bugzilla. I have seen an increasing number of posts of people who attach a comment to a bug saying "this is really important to me, it needs to be implemented ASAP". The usual response is "Please stop spamming us. We have limited resources and will get to bugs in time (possibly a long time). If you really want this bug fixed, fix it yourself, or pay somebody to fix it for you."

The problem with this is that there are not many people who (even if they are programmers) are up to speed with the Mozilla code and can fix bugs. This mostly rules out do it yourself. That also means that it is probably rather expensive to hire one of these people for the time it takes to fix some bug. I'm thinking $200 to $5000 depending on the amount of work it would take (especially for some of the more far reaching feature requests.)

How hard would it be to add a distributed "pay for development of feature" option to open source projects? The idea is that if 1000 people want a bug fixed and each can pledge $1 to the person that fixes it (and contributes the open source to the project), you might be able to get a lot of bugs fixed and have some revenue stream for developers.

The first hurdle is setting up the pledge system. I don't if Paypal or another mircopayment system could be rigged for "pledge mode".

After the pledge system is in place, you would have to decide who can say if a bug is "fixed". It can't be the person that gets the money. It could possibly be a vote of the people paying, or it could be some designated third party.

People contributing money would probably also want a time limit on their pledges. "I'll pledge $10 if this gets fixed in the next three months", but not "I'll give $10 whenever this gets fixed".

Does anybody here have any insight as to how this could be implemented?