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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope
Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."
> No one is forced to contribute to OOS.
Except through shame and ostracism. You really should read the rest of my posts.
> Your skills and contributions are less important to the OSS
> community than is ("our" notion of) freedom.
And what exactly is the difference between "you" and "me" here? My sentiments are going to be the same for every programmer who wants to make a living from the work he loves; writing good, useful software with beautiful interfaces and algorithms. He wants to be recognized and paid for the result of the best efforts of his mind, of his imagination and daring, and of his design skills; not for some boring, repetetive, mechanical, and off-shoreable job like doing customer support, talking on the phone all day with irate, angry, and stupid people, or the mindless drudgery of database screen customization. That is the nature of "me" and my ilk. And what is the nature of "you"?
> "We" would prefer to do without "you"
Can you really afford to tell all the skilled programmers in the world that you will do just fine without them? Probably yes. Average people don't need computers for anything anyway.
> than to allow "our" software to be embraced and extended (and lost).
In other words, you don't want anyone to improve it unless they do it for free. How kind of you. Only slaves need apply.
> If you think you could do better, start writing your own operating system.
Writing an operating system is not hard. If you look around the net you'll find out that everybody and his dog has done it. There are dozens of operating systems, but there are no applications for any of them because nobody is using them. You see, although you are "free" to run any operating system you want, I am also "free" not to write any software for it, since with your attitude I will obviously not be able to profit from that activity. Look no further for reasons why nobody writes games for Linux, or why nobody can make money from business software on Linux (software, not support), and why Windows still runs on nearly every desktop and is quite likely to continue to do so.