Everything free -- what's the business plan?
by HoserHead (599)
How does Canonical plan on making money? Ubuntu seems to be completely and utterly free, in both senses of the word. In my mind at least, the 'services will pay for development' business plan for Free Software went out of style when the dot-com bubble burst. How will your company be different?
MS: You're right that the "services pay for development" model is unlikely to work very well for single applications. An entire distribution, though, is slightly different, because the number of users is potentially much, much greater than the number of users for, say, a web server or database app.
Canonical provides support for Ubuntu, but more importantly we provide support for companies that provide support for Ubuntu. The idea is to create an ecosystem of people who collaborate on the free software. You can see the beginnings of that ecosystem on this page of Ubuntu service providers, and I hope it will continue grow as fast as it has since Warty hit the streets.
Part of being sustainable is keeping the costs down, so we focus resources on development and support, not marketing or office waste. The guys will tell you I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to the frills (Canonical One doesn't *actually* belong to Canonical:-).
I'd very much like to make the distro project sustainable, because I've never had the privilege to work with such talented guys who work as hard as this team, and they deserve to be rewarded and to know that people appreciate the value they add every day. If it doesn't work out that way, though, I'm honoured to consider it a gift back to the open source world, which played such a critical role in helping me build Thawte. So I hope it's commerce, though it may turn out to be philanthropy. Either way, it's still cheaper than going back to space, or hooking up with fast planes/boats/women, which I supposed would be Plan B.
Sure you can; just make it illegal to do it.
For a case study, read up on "Lysenkoism", in which Joseph Stalin decreed that "science" was whatever he said it was, and any Soviet scientist who disagreed with him by raising "facts" or "data" was swept off to the Gulag.
at the same time, challenges scientists to be less dogmatic and more open in how they connect to the public;
and is actually funny and fun to watch to boot
... go grab "Flock of Dodos" on DVD. (Here's the Amazon reviews page for it.) It's a smart, insightful film that challenges assumptions on both sides of the issue. If it got one tenth of the exposure that the craptastic "Expelled" is getting, the country would be a better place.
Initial reviews of these devices unsurprisingly expose them to be underpowered and lacklustre. What's the appeal?
It's small
It's light
It's cheap
It's powerful enough to handle most everyday tasks
Seriously, why is it so hard to understand why they're popular? Until now there was no way to get all four of those factors in the same machine; you could get a cheap laptop that was big and heavy, or an ultralight laptop that cost $2000. Now you don't have to trade off between carry-ability and price.
They could get 10 million signatures, and Boll could say "Screw you guys, I'm going to make MORE bad movies!" and I'm not going to be up in arms about it, even though I did sign the petition, because I think it's funny.
It's actually worse than that; Boll comes out ahead no matter what happens:
Most likely outcome: petition picks up a few thousand signatures and then fizzles out. Boll can now point to it as evidence that the "geek backlash" against his work is overblown.
Less likely alternate outcome: petition picks up a million+ signatures. Boll can now point to it as proof that he is "edgy" and "controversial", which is useful since his latest project appears to be an attempt to offend as many people as humanly possible. "The movie that a million people tried to keep you from seeing" makes a great pitch line to entertainment "reporters".
The only way it could possibly be any more useful for Boll is if he himself set up the petition and is using it to gather the email addresses of people who hate him. Working email addresses fetch a pretty penny on the spam market, so it becomes like printing free money.
Here's hoping Longhorn (aka Windows Vista) is the first Microsoft OS to default users to non-administrator accounts. Because users can't help themselves-- they just have to poke the bunny.
What? You want to use ALL of your installed 8 GB or RAM, not only 2 GB? Sure! The "improved memory accessibility module" subscription goes for just $1.50/GB/month!
It was a bit before my time, but the story goes that IBM used to operate in pretty much exactly this way back in the mainframe days. They would sell the customer a mainframe at a certain performance level, but actually ship them a much more powerful machine with some of its resources disabled/limited/throttled via software, so that it performed at the (lower) level the customer had been sold. Then when the customer needed an upgrade, they would bill them a ginormous amount, then send out a service tech to "install the upgrade" -- but all he really did was remove the limiters. This was called a "golden screwdriver" upgrade because the tech could earn IBM hundreds of thousands of dollars just with the proverbial turn of a screw.
(X)HTML, on the other hand, is quite accessible by default, since you'd have to work really hard to avoid any semantic markup at all.
Semantic markup is a step towards accessibility, but semantic markup does not equal accessibility. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit ALT attributes on their IMG tags, for example, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit TITLE attributes on their links, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. And so on.
Accessibility isn't easy and you don't get it for free, no matter which format you use.
Flash has more and more accessibility support, but PDF is the Page Description Format. It's meant for print output and says nothing about the meaning of the contents of the document, just how they are supposed to look on the screen and on the page.
Um, there is a reason why school administrators administrate schools instead of multi-billion dollar corporations?
So give the money to a specially created third party charged with managing the development of the software, and give the participating universities seats on the board of the new third party so they can kick back if it starts to go off the rails.
I have embarked on this project not just to sell a book but also to try to explore new models for books. We're going to try to make Free free in every way possible. The audiobook is going to be a free mp3 download. I am not going to promise what we will do, but these are things we are talking about. The e-book can be free. Again, the marginal cost of distributing that is zero. Price follows cost. Why should I charge for the book when it costs me nothing? People who do own the e-books tend to be influential early adopters, exactly who you should be giving the book to.
... for all you frustrated users out there (and apparently you are legion). I have absolutely no experience with Blackboard, Moodle, or any other product in this category for that matter, so excuse me if this is a dumb question.
A lot of the responses in this thread seem to fall into one of two categories:
"We use Blackboard, it sucks and is expensive"
"We use Moodle, it sucks and is FOSS"
So my question is, why don't a few of the universities that fall into the first category take some of the money they are plowing into Blackboard licenses (which presumably is quite a chunk of change) and use it hire some developers to improve Moodle to the point where it does not suck?
That would seem to be the best way to get to the place you all want to be (using software that is both inexpensive and non-sucky). Why isn't anyone doing it?
Any good shared-calendar system (including, yes, MS Exchange) will allow you to reject meetings that people propose for your calendar. They will even let you propose alternate dates and times for the meeting so that you can still have the meeting but at a time that's better for you.
And let's ignore the fact that AJAX really doesn't work without XML, will we? Because that kind of defeats the original whiney argument.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but this assertion is just incorrect. Plenty of "AJAX" systems use non-XML formats to ship data around. One obvious alternative is JSON, but others exist too.
(Unless you're talking about "AJAX using XML" in the sense of "AJAX manipulating the DOM", but that's not really accurate either, since most sites don't provide well-formed XML as output and they still use AJAX techniques just fine.)
Not really. Even surveys of high-information voters -- people who are active in the political process -- put Gravel in the less-than-one-percent bracket. In contrast, candidates like Chris Dodd and Joe Biden did better among those activists than they did with the general public.
From my limited understanding of human psychology, I detest polls or referring to them as evidence at all. The wording of the question as well as the order in which the questions were asked affect it too much.
Gravel is at less than one percent in every single poll ever taken, which would discount issues of bias in a particular survey. You may not like polls, and it's true that you can create an individual poll that drives responses in one direction or another. But it's hard to discount the enormous pile of evidence that we have that Americans don't see Gravel as a serious candidate (and for good reason).
Dangit, slashcode didn't like me using a "less than" sign. Previous post should read "his poll numbers are so low (less than 1%) as to be statistically meaningless."
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth himself answered this question in his Slashdot interview back in 2005:
Um, that's in the spec already. Both the "height" and "width" attributes for the IMG tag can be defined as percentages.
No discussion of how many blades there are on razors these days is complete until somebody posts this. So I figured I'd just get it out of the way :-)
Seriously, why is it so hard to understand why they're popular? Until now there was no way to get all four of those factors in the same machine; you could get a cheap laptop that was big and heavy, or an ultralight laptop that cost $2000. Now you don't have to trade off between carry-ability and price.
They could get 10 million signatures, and Boll could say "Screw you guys, I'm going to make MORE bad movies!" and I'm not going to be up in arms about it, even though I did sign the petition, because I think it's funny.
It's actually worse than that; Boll comes out ahead no matter what happens:
The only way it could possibly be any more useful for Boll is if he himself set up the petition and is using it to gather the email addresses of people who hate him. Working email addresses fetch a pretty penny on the spam market, so it becomes like printing free money.
The Coding Horror post you link to on the "dancing bunnies problem" actually mentions that Unix-style privilege elevation is the best known solution to it:
Google have hired Codeweavers to develop improvements for Wine specifically to enhance the performance of Photoshop.
They don't appear to be quite there yet with CS3 but all previous versions up to CS2 reportedly run well.
Don't be [REDACTED].
It was a bit before my time, but the story goes that IBM used to operate in pretty much exactly this way back in the mainframe days. They would sell the customer a mainframe at a certain performance level, but actually ship them a much more powerful machine with some of its resources disabled/limited/throttled via software, so that it performed at the (lower) level the customer had been sold. Then when the customer needed an upgrade, they would bill them a ginormous amount, then send out a service tech to "install the upgrade" -- but all he really did was remove the limiters. This was called a "golden screwdriver" upgrade because the tech could earn IBM hundreds of thousands of dollars just with the proverbial turn of a screw.
"I am not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat."
-- Will Rogers
Semantic markup is a step towards accessibility, but semantic markup does not equal accessibility. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit ALT attributes on their IMG tags, for example, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit TITLE attributes on their links, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. And so on.
Accessibility isn't easy and you don't get it for free, no matter which format you use.
Um, PDFs can be made just as accessible as HTML documents, and Adobe's PDF tools have good integrated support for assistive technologies built in.
PDF accessibility is a lot like HTML accessibility; you have to know what you're doing to make it happen, but you can make it happen.
So give the money to a specially created third party charged with managing the development of the software, and give the participating universities seats on the board of the new third party so they can kick back if it starts to go off the rails.
Actually, yes:
... for all you frustrated users out there (and apparently you are legion). I have absolutely no experience with Blackboard, Moodle, or any other product in this category for that matter, so excuse me if this is a dumb question.
A lot of the responses in this thread seem to fall into one of two categories:
So my question is, why don't a few of the universities that fall into the first category take some of the money they are plowing into Blackboard licenses (which presumably is quite a chunk of change) and use it hire some developers to improve Moodle to the point where it does not suck?
That would seem to be the best way to get to the place you all want to be (using software that is both inexpensive and non-sucky). Why isn't anyone doing it?
Twitter is down, like, half the time.
How long until the first lawsuit from a disgruntled plant-owner whose plant died because he was waiting for a tweet that never came?
(Note for the humor-impaired: I keed, I keed!)
Any good shared-calendar system (including, yes, MS Exchange) will allow you to reject meetings that people propose for your calendar. They will even let you propose alternate dates and times for the meeting so that you can still have the meeting but at a time that's better for you.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but this assertion is just incorrect. Plenty of "AJAX" systems use non-XML formats to ship data around. One obvious alternative is JSON, but others exist too.
(Unless you're talking about "AJAX using XML" in the sense of "AJAX manipulating the DOM", but that's not really accurate either, since most sites don't provide well-formed XML as output and they still use AJAX techniques just fine.)
Well, there are still some controllers you can only find in the arcade... (thank God).
Not really. Even surveys of high-information voters -- people who are active in the political process -- put Gravel in the less-than-one-percent bracket. In contrast, candidates like Chris Dodd and Joe Biden did better among those activists than they did with the general public.
Gravel is at less than one percent in every single poll ever taken, which would discount issues of bias in a particular survey. You may not like polls, and it's true that you can create an individual poll that drives responses in one direction or another. But it's hard to discount the enormous pile of evidence that we have that Americans don't see Gravel as a serious candidate (and for good reason).
Dangit, slashcode didn't like me using a "less than" sign. Previous post should read "his poll numbers are so low (less than 1%) as to be statistically meaningless."
There aren't; they've all dropped out, except for Mike Gravel, but his poll numbers are so low (