Despite a lot of what we've heard over the past few years, businesses survive by earning a profit, not by simply collecting more investor money. Charity from Linux enthusiasts would only keep Mandrakesoft alive for a finite (and short) time. Then what? The only way to sustain it is to figure out a way for it to make money.
Would it make sense to invest $1000 in Mandrakesoft? What would you get for your money? Perhaps you'd get five more releases of
Mandrake Linux. (Nobody is expecting to make a profit or even get any money back, it seems.) So you're paying $200 per release -- these releases come about 3-4 times as quickly as Windows or MacOS, don't forget. Is it worth it?
Don't get me wrong, I really like (and use) Mandrake-Linux and the guys at Mandrakesoft have been great to me, but you'd do them much more good by suggesting a way for them to make money than by giving them $1000. Once they have your great idea in hand, they can sell goods and/or services for profit and survive as long as their market will have them.
It's worse than just trying to fight off skilled
crackers, etc. During a brief stint at Los Alamos as a researcher
I heard this story: The classified portions
of an MS Word document were highlighted and
cut out so that the document could be sent to
individuals without the proper clearance.
Unfortunately, because the "Undo" feature
works across sessions (the undo information is
stored in the saved document) all the uncleared
recipients had to do was Edit->Undo to see
the classified portions.
The lab could educate the secretaries and researchers about the "gotchas" of every commercial product they use (and they do try),
but people are bound to forget or make mistakes.
If they deployed open source software they
could inspect and modify the code to make these
holes unavailable.
The Assayer helps defeat one of the arguments
against open content -- that editors/publishers are required to protect readers at large from
having to wade through junk. That puts a lot
of power in the hands of few. This open reviewing system lets "the people"
decide for themselves.
With the big-publisher filter out of the way,
we should hope to see more niche or small-market content (or content that might not be appreciated by big publishers) become available.
Well, I'm one author (KDE 2.0 Development) who thinks this
is quite an unreasonable and self-harming request that the authors are making. Don't the authors want their work to be read? If a book gets sold as used, that
means that two people will have an opportunity to read it instead of just one. Maybe the second person will enjoy it and/or find it useful. S/He might then tell a friend about how good the book is, or buy your next book new.
If you want to make more money, I'd suggest you write a better book.
OS X may look cool, [Bill Gates] says, but it?s ?just sexy widgets.? To go all the way, he explains, you have to define a new style for a new generation of applications. You have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it.
...
Microsoft thinks that the answer might lie in a ?universal type-in line,? an always-active blank space that intelligently processes what the user wants to do at a given moment
Hundreds of millions on dollars spent on
GUI redesign and they came up with the command
line.
Yea, but hopefully the Linux version will
be cheaper and, since it's open source,
it might have more software, potential for more creative hacking, and potenial for earlier
adoption of new technologies and standards.
If you want (and the poster does) to collect and customize content, rather than creating it all from scratch, open content is ideal.
What we need is to collect open content (see Opencontent web site, Andamooka)
and create online tools for organizing and
redistributing it.
This worked for open source software (who doesn't
reuse other people's code?), but open content is a little different b/c the typical content re-user isn't technically proficient like typical code-reuser (programmer) is.
Those who are need to create the necessary tools. This is part of the discussion
going on in the FreeBooks project.
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Would it make sense to invest $1000 in Mandrakesoft? What would you get for your money? Perhaps you'd get five more releases of Mandrake Linux. (Nobody is expecting to make a profit or even get any money back, it seems.) So you're paying $200 per release -- these releases come about 3-4 times as quickly as Windows or MacOS, don't forget. Is it worth it?
Don't get me wrong, I really like (and use) Mandrake-Linux and the guys at Mandrakesoft have been great to me, but you'd do them much more good by suggesting a way for them to make money than by giving them $1000. Once they have your great idea in hand, they can sell goods and/or services for profit and survive as long as their market will have them.
Dave
Many of the books relate to open source software. KDE 2.0 Development , GTK+/GNOME Application Development by Havoc Pennington, and The Cathedral & The Bazaar by ESR are among them.
The lab could educate the secretaries and researchers about the "gotchas" of every commercial product they use (and they do try), but people are bound to forget or make mistakes. If they deployed open source software they could inspect and modify the code to make these holes unavailable.
With the big-publisher filter out of the way, we should hope to see more niche or small-market content (or content that might not be appreciated by big publishers) become available.
If you want to make more money, I'd suggest you write a better book.
Hundreds of millions on dollars spent on GUI redesign and they came up with the command line.
Dave
The significance is that the inventor of the Internet has lost the race for president.
Dave
What we need is to collect open content (see Opencontent web site, Andamooka) and create online tools for organizing and redistributing it.
This worked for open source software (who doesn't reuse other people's code?), but open content is a little different b/c the typical content re-user isn't technically proficient like typical code-reuser (programmer) is. Those who are need to create the necessary tools. This is part of the discussion going on in the FreeBooks project.
Dave
http://www.andamooka.org/files.shtml Dave