Well said. The industry must adapt and provide a service that is useful and desired by people now. It's stuck on an outmoded business model, which is no longer relevant to our times.The industry by and large refuses to recognize that its medium has changed from a discrete physical one (CD media) to the Internet.
When the music industry recognized the medium changing from vinyl to eight-track to tape to CD, it always embraceed the new medium and sold on it. It's incredibly weird that it hasn't embraced the new medium, the Internet. The musci/movie/etc. industries should long ago have become ISPs, selling access to the content they produce via the modern medium, the Internet.
I would be very interested in buying such an electric car. As someone who lives in a large city, the small size is a good thing (helps in finding parking and such).
The problem is that a large quantity, if not most of the people that live in big cities, where these sorts of vehicles are targeted, live in apartments, condos, flats, etc. We don't, for the most part, have garages. That means, the car is sitting on the street at night and in order to charge it, I'd have to find some way to run an enormous extension cord out of my apartment to the car. That's just totally impractical. Often I can't even find a parking spot for my car in front of my building. Even if I could do this, chances are someone will trip over the cord as they walk down the sidewalk, or it will cause some other catastrophe. Worse, in the winter when the streets and sidewalks are covered in snow, plows will come by and just mangle the power cord.
I wish they'd stop targeting these types of vehicles to people living in large cities... they're far better suited to someone living in a suburban area that must commute into the city for his/her job.
The next car purchase I make, I'd like to find something that is more environmentally friendly than the regular gas vehicles I've purchased in the past. But this one practical issue is a major stumbling block for all-electric vehicles.
Though puretracks may have just dropped DRM, they're not the only company in Canada to offer that. Another company called Zunior (zunior.com) is doing the same but they take it a step further and offer downloads in FLAC format. They also include album images and such in the download. That's the way to do it. I wish every company would treat their music downloads this way. People have high-speed connections now, why not offer high-quality audio? I don't want to pay $8-10 for MP3s when I can get the CD for nearly the same price but I'll pay it for a guarantee of high audio quality and liner notes, with the ease of an immediate download.
I think some of the creative commons ones come pretty close to being the most applicable. I would love to see something, Creative Commonsesque, which functions specifically for a co-op sort of arrangement. In other words, where it enables its free usage for members of a co-op. In that way, one could create a co-op of developers, players, artisan board game craftspeople, etc. that mutually benefit by freely sharing the game's rules, design attributes, and community among one another. I've talked to a lawyer a little bit about this but haven't made a huge amount of progress in coming up with such a thing yet.
The forking question is interesting, I've given that a lot of thought. One of the interesting things about long-standing games such as chess, are the variants that people develop. It can be quite a positive thing and, I think, a sign of a well-loved (successful) game. I worry a little though that in the initial stages of introducing a new game to people that it should have a pretty solid grounding so it's easy to learn and play.
The two are not mutually exclusive and it isn't that simple of an either/or decision.
The point is that if you do something in a FOSS fashion you're licensing it in a way , which confers certain rights and attribution. If you bring it to a company without an NDA, you put yourself in a place to potentially lose all rights or the possibility of attribution.
In other words, one way (the FOSS way) can enable well-understood and accepted controls for efficient distribution, collaboration, and attribution, while the other way simply reveals everything with no guarantee of rights (especially where dealing with certain people that might not respect ones' ideas).
Wow, that's great. I had no interest in a game design career--I was just focused on the one particular game, but your point is interesting, maybe coming up with something else would be a good means to that end.
This article caught my interest because I've been in a somewhat similar situation, though I've been pursuing it for the past six years. Here is my story, if anyone is interested or might have further suggestions.
I spent considerable time writing a two-player strategy board game. In fact, I've spent over five years play testing it with different people and refining the rules until it became quite fun and playable. I've developed notation for it as well, so games can be played by correspondence. It would appeal to any chess freak (of which I consider myself one) though aside from requiring two players there is no similarity. It has a beautiful and unique board that a friend and I designed. My goal in creating the game was to introduce a game that could trigger new and different ways of thinking in a collaborative strategy process toward central transcendence goals as opposed to one of conquest (such as chess or go).
Yeah yeah, it may sound complex, but no more so than chess, in fact it has fewer rules and as any serious strategy game enthusiast understands, it's not so much the rules as the intricacies of play that inspire.
I've researched many board game companies in earnest. I looked for those that produced quality designer games (Gigamic, for example) to large multinationals (Megabloks). I wrote nice introductory letters to them. I included overview teasers of the game concept without revealing too much (just to get their interest but protect my idea), and I included my own game NDA from a lawyer.
The responses I got were typically that the companies wanted me to send the rules but would not sign an NDA (in other words, once receiving the rules, they'd potentially be able to develop it and never give credit where credit was due). That is a reality, an experienced, professional game designer warned me about it.
From the game company's perspective of course, they've got to be careful too. They live in fear that if they see something submitted from outside their company, and just happen to be developing something similar on their own, that they'll wind up getting sued. One company persistantly asked me to send them my prototype (of which I made several) but refused to sign the NDA for this very reason. Some companies have their own NDAs, and I've found that sometimes these are sufficient because they seem to have wording that protects both parties (but not always!). At one point, Megabloks signed an NDA with me and they play-tested my prototype but unfortunately my game was just totally out of the realm of the sort they publish. That's to say that even though game companies may like to get good ideas, most are really closed to anyone that is not already in their industry or better, employed by them.
So I'm still looking, considering saving my money to self-publish it, but it's not cheap and I'm not wealthy. My other dream objective for the game, which I have yet to fully lay out in detail would be to form some sort of co-op that involved a few free and open source developers, which would be interested in making a networked electronic (client/server) version of the game (like all those FICS/chess servers) that exist. I would love to see it spread all over and feel like having an electronic FOSS version would really help popularize it in terms of getting a company interested in distributing a physical version of the game. I've always felt that it would be incredibly appealing to sell a physical board game with an online subscription included and a FOSS version makes sense if not for the philosophy for the simple fact that it would be the most efficient way to jumpstart its spread. I dunno, maybe someone is interested in collaborating on that.:-)
Well put, I agree. I've always thought that being a citizen of a country with democratic processes should imply a responsibility to make oneself aware of the issues in order to participate in the election process via voting.
Well said! And let's not forget the insertion of one's self. Is this territory that blogging has been consuming toward its endlessly obese orbit? I wonder where the article's author was searching for his non-existant writer? Perhaps he needed more exposure to a few of the appliances you mentioned. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the appeal for people to stand out from what these appliances deliver and present, as you say, "... the things worth reading and weave technology into the fabric..." it's just, how does such an individual stand out like that, these days?
Are both the pleasures of reading and the enjoyment of creativity truly lost to so many in the "information age"? For such a largely technical community I'm baffled why more people aren't suggesting improvements on search engine ranking and categorization methods. After all, such methods are neither permanent nor unchanging. Certainly, we collectively have and can develop ways to organize and use keywords that search engines could take better advantage of, rather than just giving so much emphasis to the titles. Web content may be information but it's not just information. Google and the like should add some other dimensions into their search results, such as which articles are more likely to have unique points, humour, seriousness, blandness, or wit, etc.
I came across a site called, if I remember correctly (can't seem to access it at the moment though) del.irio.us, which was a similar idea and I think I remember it being open source.
My first thought too, was that this was just like CafePress.com. CafePress has been around for years and has really done a good job refining their services, for DIYers, they're an excellent resource. I'm surprised nobody's entioned Lulu.com yet (especially since it has Bob Young at the helm). One of the really interesting things about lulu.com is that they don't just make books, CDs, etc. based on users' creative content but they also facilitate collaborative work between the people that use their site.
Perhaps this has been posted and I simply missed it in the thread, but just in case nobody has seen this... OpenOffice.org has a site for outreach/marketing type information, which includes a section for schools. You might find some helpful information, like a case study and such there. The link to their site is
I've been researching situations like yours as this is an area I focus on for the analyst firm I work for. I can offer you some suggestions to help and a few stats. We have an evaluation tool FOSS Evaluation Center for ERP and CRM systems, as well as others with a combined total of about 7,000 functional criteria. We recently launched a new system (though we're still working out some kinks and refining it) to compare how vendors support these criteria but giving a priority advantage to the ones that support open source platforms, or are themselves open source platforms (both Compiere and SugarCRM are included). You can use this for free for a couple hours (more time requires a fee). It will also show you other vendors that run on Linux or support MySQL or PostgreSQL. If you want some stats about vendors supporting those systems, I recently wrote an article (sorry, there is a required free registration to read it). That shows the demand for the last year for enterprise systems that support those platforms, versus the enterprise vendors that actually support them.
I'd be interested in discussing this more in depth as well, since I'm trying to build up more research in this regard and am thus, all ears to find out what people are seeking from vendors.
Exactly right. The problem is a social one, to be dealt with using social/cultural pressure and plain old smarts. It's a bad idea to attempt to regulate social behaviours like this with laws. Since humans involve themselves in constantly mutating forms of social interractions, there's a good chance that people will be involved in a similar activity that gets misconstrued or is found unpalatable by a naughty entity (like say, a big bad corporation), which will then use the law against the spirit in which it was formulated.
I used to work for one called Intraware (intraware.com), that's basically their whole purpose for existing--they deliver software electronically for other companies.
to our changing reality is not what Bon Jovi is doing. If you would like a good example of what is possible, you should rely on creative individuals like Einstürzende Neubauten. They are really thinking about ways to connect their music and creative processes with the people that are most interested. Their site has an excellent audio message by Blixa Bargeld about their plans.
I am not a programmer, though I do understand formalized logic concepts. I love free software for a lot of reasons, especially the ideas it promotes in a broad cultural sense.
I am about to make a gross generalization but I do not intend this as an
insult--it is one observation based on reading forums such as Slashdot, and
I have possibly formed a flawed opinion. Here we go, the problem is: programmers
frequently do not spend the time thinking about their work's place in our world.
While fascinating things are taking place as a result of present-day technology
and its realm of specialized languages, programmers tend to (and this is useful
for good programming work I think) focus their attention on close-range,
mechanical details of problems. But this type of attention is not
enough when considering how the programming activities and results affect our
society.
I think there is essentially a struggle in our cultural psyche these days over
emerging dimensions in thinking--and it heavily involves the notion of
"property." The legions of free and open source programmers began something
that, while it may have certain pragmatic features in programming and possibly
even business, is much, MUCH more significant toward human expression and
creativity. Unfortunately, I rarely ever see/hear discussions from programmers
about how their methods of work and culture affect such changes in our broader
culture and thinking.
Listen, every time the issue of free (and open source) versus propriety software
arises, why is the discussion about whether or not the business model works? Why
is the discussion about which method produces better software? It's not
difficult to come up with arguments for each side; actually I've read TONS of
articles over the years about both. I'm not suggesting these things shouldn't be
discussed, but I do believe they are being discussed to the point now of
drowning out consideration of other, likely more important issues.
Let's say that (without going into tons of detail because it will take me
forever and you probably already are noticing the effects of my coffee) we all
agreed that a future of free software is necessary for promoting free human
expression in a variety of creative forms (things like artwork, writing, and
music). If that is the case and that is important to us, shouldn't we
examine where our priorities are? Do we make a buck at the expense of our free
expression? If we limit, to an extreme, our ability to express ourselves, will we
lose the ability altogether? Suppose we would. Stand back and look at the way
our world would be, consider all the implications this would have on our
culture. Not a quick look, not focusing on a few details--a slow, enduring,
inclusive look.
Anyway, if we don't want to our culture to colonize and imprison its own
thinking, we ought to consider free software's worth in more expansive terms
than whether or not it allows for a successful business plan. And if we then
still want to consider business plans, let's do it. If I need my house painted,
I can pay a painter for his labor. I don't purchase the set of methods for
painting my house. While many open source/free software companies have failing
business plans, perhaps the plans are failing because the current (proprietary
software) industry is flawed, not because the plans are bad. Of course I
wouldn't recognize the flaws in the industry if I just focused on the
details--I need to think about it in a much greater context.
MS execs try to create a general attitude about Free Software, Open Source, and/or Linux that is negative. This is obvious because of things like Ballmer's comments and other recent MS exec's comments.
The interesting thing is not what that attitude means right now, but rather, what it will enable in the future. This is like a chess game.
Here is what I mean. If you read this article from Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000625_hailstorm. html) in the last paragraph, you will see that a very "intelligent" Microsoft strategy is being birthed. Where the.Net platform locks Internet-based services into Microsoft technology and logic. Hence, PAYing customers will have to use/continue using Microsoft products to get these services.
This duplicates Microsoft's current usefulness to any company developing for a software platform. If a little company makes their product/service available through Microsoft's technologies the little company instantly has access to the largest pool of potential customers. That probably makes sense if you want to make a lot of money.
The thing is, how does Microsoft get such a huge base of people using and implementing (critical mass?) its payment (and other) services first? That is the challenge for Microsoft. They *need* to get businesses and the public feeling generally negative toward free and open source types of philosophies. Hence the inappropriate "cancer" and "intellectual property" notions MS execs spout. With that kind of feeling in the business environment, MS gains an important advantage in convincing everyone to deploy MS technology. Thus, MS locks businesses, organizations, governements, individuals, etc. into a new era of MS monopoly through the Internet and in the form of MS-based payment systems/intellectual property bottleneckers, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. The industry must adapt and provide a service that is useful and desired by people now. It's stuck on an outmoded business model, which is no longer relevant to our times.The industry by and large refuses to recognize that its medium has changed from a discrete physical one (CD media) to the Internet.
When the music industry recognized the medium changing from vinyl to eight-track to tape to CD, it always embraceed the new medium and sold on it. It's incredibly weird that it hasn't embraced the new medium, the Internet. The musci/movie/etc. industries should long ago have become ISPs, selling access to the content they produce via the modern medium, the Internet.
I would be very interested in buying such an electric car. As someone who lives in a large city, the small size is a good thing (helps in finding parking and such).
The problem is that a large quantity, if not most of the people that live in big cities, where these sorts of vehicles are targeted, live in apartments, condos, flats, etc. We don't, for the most part, have garages. That means, the car is sitting on the street at night and in order to charge it, I'd have to find some way to run an enormous extension cord out of my apartment to the car. That's just totally impractical. Often I can't even find a parking spot for my car in front of my building. Even if I could do this, chances are someone will trip over the cord as they walk down the sidewalk, or it will cause some other catastrophe. Worse, in the winter when the streets and sidewalks are covered in snow, plows will come by and just mangle the power cord.
I wish they'd stop targeting these types of vehicles to people living in large cities... they're far better suited to someone living in a suburban area that must commute into the city for his/her job.
The next car purchase I make, I'd like to find something that is more environmentally friendly than the regular gas vehicles I've purchased in the past. But this one practical issue is a major stumbling block for all-electric vehicles.
Though puretracks may have just dropped DRM, they're not the only company in Canada to offer that. Another company called Zunior (zunior.com) is doing the same but they take it a step further and offer downloads in FLAC format. They also include album images and such in the download. That's the way to do it. I wish every company would treat their music downloads this way. People have high-speed connections now, why not offer high-quality audio? I don't want to pay $8-10 for MP3s when I can get the CD for nearly the same price but I'll pay it for a guarantee of high audio quality and liner notes, with the ease of an immediate download.
I think some of the creative commons ones come pretty close to being the most applicable. I would love to see something, Creative Commonsesque, which functions specifically for a co-op sort of arrangement. In other words, where it enables its free usage for members of a co-op. In that way, one could create a co-op of developers, players, artisan board game craftspeople, etc. that mutually benefit by freely sharing the game's rules, design attributes, and community among one another. I've talked to a lawyer a little bit about this but haven't made a huge amount of progress in coming up with such a thing yet.
The forking question is interesting, I've given that a lot of thought. One of the interesting things about long-standing games such as chess, are the variants that people develop. It can be quite a positive thing and, I think, a sign of a well-loved (successful) game. I worry a little though that in the initial stages of introducing a new game to people that it should have a pretty solid grounding so it's easy to learn and play.
The two are not mutually exclusive and it isn't that simple of an either/or decision.
The point is that if you do something in a FOSS fashion you're licensing it in a way , which confers certain rights and attribution. If you bring it to a company without an NDA, you put yourself in a place to potentially lose all rights or the possibility of attribution.
In other words, one way (the FOSS way) can enable well-understood and accepted controls for efficient distribution, collaboration, and attribution, while the other way simply reveals everything with no guarantee of rights (especially where dealing with certain people that might not respect ones' ideas).
Wow, that's great. I had no interest in a game design career--I was just focused on the one particular game, but your point is interesting, maybe coming up with something else would be a good means to that end.
This article caught my interest because I've been in a somewhat similar situation, though I've been pursuing it for the past six years. Here is my story, if anyone is interested or might have further suggestions.
:-)
I spent considerable time writing a two-player strategy board game. In fact, I've spent over five years play testing it with different people and refining the rules until it became quite fun and playable. I've developed notation for it as well, so games can be played by correspondence. It would appeal to any chess freak (of which I consider myself one) though aside from requiring two players there is no similarity. It has a beautiful and unique board that a friend and I designed. My goal in creating the game was to introduce a game that could trigger new and different ways of thinking in a collaborative strategy process toward central transcendence goals as opposed to one of conquest (such as chess or go).
Yeah yeah, it may sound complex, but no more so than chess, in fact it has fewer rules and as any serious strategy game enthusiast understands, it's not so much the rules as the intricacies of play that inspire.
I've researched many board game companies in earnest. I looked for those that produced quality designer games (Gigamic, for example) to large multinationals (Megabloks). I wrote nice introductory letters to them. I included overview teasers of the game concept without revealing too much (just to get their interest but protect my idea), and I included my own game NDA from a lawyer.
The responses I got were typically that the companies wanted me to send the rules but would not sign an NDA (in other words, once receiving the rules, they'd potentially be able to develop it and never give credit where credit was due). That is a reality, an experienced, professional game designer warned me about it.
From the game company's perspective of course, they've got to be careful too. They live in fear that if they see something submitted from outside their company, and just happen to be developing something similar on their own, that they'll wind up getting sued. One company persistantly asked me to send them my prototype (of which I made several) but refused to sign the NDA for this very reason. Some companies have their own NDAs, and I've found that sometimes these are sufficient because they seem to have wording that protects both parties (but not always!). At one point, Megabloks signed an NDA with me and they play-tested my prototype but unfortunately my game was just totally out of the realm of the sort they publish. That's to say that even though game companies may like to get good ideas, most are really closed to anyone that is not already in their industry or better, employed by them.
So I'm still looking, considering saving my money to self-publish it, but it's not cheap and I'm not wealthy. My other dream objective for the game, which I have yet to fully lay out in detail would be to form some sort of co-op that involved a few free and open source developers, which would be interested in making a networked electronic (client/server) version of the game (like all those FICS/chess servers) that exist. I would love to see it spread all over and feel like having an electronic FOSS version would really help popularize it in terms of getting a company interested in distributing a physical version of the game. I've always felt that it would be incredibly appealing to sell a physical board game with an online subscription included and a FOSS version makes sense if not for the philosophy for the simple fact that it would be the most efficient way to jumpstart its spread. I dunno, maybe someone is interested in collaborating on that.
Well put, I agree. I've always thought that being a citizen of a country with democratic processes should imply a responsibility to make oneself aware of the issues in order to participate in the election process via voting.
Well said! And let's not forget the insertion of one's self. Is this territory that blogging has been consuming toward its endlessly obese orbit? I wonder where the article's author was searching for his non-existant writer? Perhaps he needed more exposure to a few of the appliances you mentioned. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the appeal for people to stand out from what these appliances deliver and present, as you say, "... the things worth reading and weave technology into the fabric..." it's just, how does such an individual stand out like that, these days?
Are both the pleasures of reading and the enjoyment of creativity truly lost to so many in the "information age"? For such a largely technical community I'm baffled why more people aren't suggesting improvements on search engine ranking and categorization methods. After all, such methods are neither permanent nor unchanging. Certainly, we collectively have and can develop ways to organize and use keywords that search engines could take better advantage of, rather than just giving so much emphasis to the titles. Web content may be information but it's not just information. Google and the like should add some other dimensions into their search results, such as which articles are more likely to have unique points, humour, seriousness, blandness, or wit, etc.
:-)
(P.S. I only put the d0rky title to annoy)
I came across a site called, if I remember correctly (can't seem to access it at the moment though) del.irio.us, which was a similar idea and I think I remember it being open source.
My first thought too, was that this was just like CafePress.com. CafePress has been around for years and has really done a good job refining their services, for DIYers, they're an excellent resource. I'm surprised nobody's entioned Lulu.com yet (especially since it has Bob Young at the helm). One of the really interesting things about lulu.com is that they don't just make books, CDs, etc. based on users' creative content but they also facilitate collaborative work between the people that use their site.
Perhaps this has been posted and I simply missed it in the thread, but just in case nobody has seen this... OpenOffice.org has a site for outreach/marketing type information, which includes a section for schools. You might find some helpful information, like a case study and such there. The link to their site is
/
http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools
I've been researching situations like yours as this is an area I focus on for the analyst firm I work for. I can offer you some suggestions to help and a few stats. We have an evaluation tool FOSS Evaluation Center for ERP and CRM systems, as well as others with a combined total of about 7,000 functional criteria. We recently launched a new system (though we're still working out some kinks and refining it) to compare how vendors support these criteria but giving a priority advantage to the ones that support open source platforms, or are themselves open source platforms (both Compiere and SugarCRM are included). You can use this for free for a couple hours (more time requires a fee). It will also show you other vendors that run on Linux or support MySQL or PostgreSQL. If you want some stats about vendors supporting those systems, I recently wrote an article (sorry, there is a required free registration to read it). That shows the demand for the last year for enterprise systems that support those platforms, versus the enterprise vendors that actually support them. I'd be interested in discussing this more in depth as well, since I'm trying to build up more research in this regard and am thus, all ears to find out what people are seeking from vendors.
Exactly right. The problem is a social one, to be dealt with using social/cultural pressure and plain old smarts. It's a bad idea to attempt to regulate social behaviours like this with laws. Since humans involve themselves in constantly mutating forms of social interractions, there's a good chance that people will be involved in a similar activity that gets misconstrued or is found unpalatable by a naughty entity (like say, a big bad corporation), which will then use the law against the spirit in which it was formulated.
You need to try some of the excellent Québec microbrews.
I used to work for one called Intraware (intraware.com), that's basically their whole purpose for existing--they deliver software electronically for other companies.
to our changing reality is not what Bon Jovi is doing. If you would like a good example of what is possible, you should rely on creative individuals like Einstürzende Neubauten. They are really thinking about ways to connect their music and creative processes with the people that are most interested. Their site has an excellent audio message by Blixa Bargeld about their plans.
I am not a programmer, though I do understand formalized logic concepts. I love free software for a lot of reasons, especially the ideas it promotes in a broad cultural sense.
I am about to make a gross generalization but I do not intend this as an
insult--it is one observation based on reading forums such as Slashdot, and
I have possibly formed a flawed opinion. Here we go, the problem is: programmers
frequently do not spend the time thinking about their work's place in our world.
While fascinating things are taking place as a result of present-day technology
and its realm of specialized languages, programmers tend to (and this is useful
for good programming work I think) focus their attention on close-range,
mechanical details of problems. But this type of attention is not
enough when considering how the programming activities and results affect our
society.
I think there is essentially a struggle in our cultural psyche these days over
emerging dimensions in thinking--and it heavily involves the notion of
"property." The legions of free and open source programmers began something
that, while it may have certain pragmatic features in programming and possibly
even business, is much, MUCH more significant toward human expression and
creativity. Unfortunately, I rarely ever see/hear discussions from programmers
about how their methods of work and culture affect such changes in our broader
culture and thinking.
Listen, every time the issue of free (and open source) versus propriety software
arises, why is the discussion about whether or not the business model works? Why
is the discussion about which method produces better software? It's not
difficult to come up with arguments for each side; actually I've read TONS of
articles over the years about both. I'm not suggesting these things shouldn't be
discussed, but I do believe they are being discussed to the point now of
drowning out consideration of other, likely more important issues.
Let's say that (without going into tons of detail because it will take me
forever and you probably already are noticing the effects of my coffee) we all
agreed that a future of free software is necessary for promoting free human
expression in a variety of creative forms (things like artwork, writing, and
music). If that is the case and that is important to us, shouldn't we
examine where our priorities are? Do we make a buck at the expense of our free
expression? If we limit, to an extreme, our ability to express ourselves, will we
lose the ability altogether? Suppose we would. Stand back and look at the way
our world would be, consider all the implications this would have on our
culture. Not a quick look, not focusing on a few details--a slow, enduring,
inclusive look.
Anyway, if we don't want to our culture to colonize and imprison its own
thinking, we ought to consider free software's worth in more expansive terms
than whether or not it allows for a successful business plan. And if we then
still want to consider business plans, let's do it. If I need my house painted,
I can pay a painter for his labor. I don't purchase the set of methods for
painting my house. While many open source/free software companies have failing
business plans, perhaps the plans are failing because the current (proprietary
software) industry is flawed, not because the plans are bad. Of course I
wouldn't recognize the flaws in the industry if I just focused on the
details--I need to think about it in a much greater context.
MS execs try to create a general attitude about Free Software, Open Source, and/or Linux that is negative. This is obvious because of things like Ballmer's comments and other recent MS exec's comments.
. html) in the last paragraph, you will see that a very "intelligent" Microsoft strategy is being birthed. Where the .Net platform locks Internet-based services into Microsoft technology and logic. Hence, PAYing customers will have to use/continue using Microsoft products to get these services.
The interesting thing is not what that attitude means right now, but rather, what it will enable in the future. This is like a chess game. Here is what I mean. If you read this article from Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000625_hailstorm
This duplicates Microsoft's current usefulness to any company developing for a software platform. If a little company makes their product/service available through Microsoft's technologies the little company instantly has access to the largest pool of potential customers. That probably makes sense if you want to make a lot of money.
The thing is, how does Microsoft get such a huge base of people using and implementing (critical mass?) its payment (and other) services first? That is the challenge for Microsoft. They *need* to get businesses and the public feeling generally negative toward free and open source types of philosophies. Hence the inappropriate "cancer" and "intellectual property" notions MS execs spout. With that kind of feeling in the business environment, MS gains an important advantage in convincing everyone to deploy MS technology. Thus, MS locks businesses, organizations, governements, individuals, etc. into a new era of MS monopoly through the Internet and in the form of MS-based payment systems/intellectual property bottleneckers, etc.