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Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up?
AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says "
Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more.
Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the Ubuntu distro is sponsored by a traditional for-profit company. The answer that has recently emerged to this question is, "yes and no."
Yes, of course, because Ubuntu's web site promises that the distro "will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates." But Ubuntu the enterprise ecosystem — understood as the collection of desktops and servers running Ubuntu in a given organization — is not."
your mom on the other hand, is still free.
That's the FOSS business model, which is why IBM is dumping money into Teh Lunix. Get companies locked into your software, then charge them up the whazoo for support.
It's really great, because rather than having the up-front costs involved in planning out what you are going to do, then hiring quality programmers to impliment it, spending time testing, etc... you just sucker people and companies into volunteering to test your software for you. Then when you get someone dumb enough to pay for support, they are really paying you to debug your code... something which would have already been done with closed source software.
Open source is a really lucrative scam, if you play your cards right. Just ask that armada of $100+/hour Lunix consultants who have been raping the city of Munich for the past several years (and have nothing to show for their work).
Lunis Torvball's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.