You're not making sense. I didn't bring up Troll Tech. I was using Redhat and Novell as examples, and someone else brought up Troll Tech as someone else who sold OSS. And like I said, i don't know exactly how much profit Sun makes off of OpenOffice, but they do sell licenses. Star Office fits the model I was talking about where a software vendor helps fund development on a FOSS so they can use it as a base for a commercial product, which they in turn sell to the general public. Whether it's a very profitable business is irrelevant, it's a business that Sun participates in.
I'm specifically not trying to be involved in anyone's discussions of their personal OSS pet-peeves.
Well, to be honest, I haven't been able to stick to the policy 100%, but it is a general rule. We do use Office 2003 and Adobe products, but only the corporate licenses that doesn't require activation, or anything else that binds the software to specific hardware. It's really for business purposes, not idealism, so the corporate versions satisfy the requirement that they "don't require activation or phoning-home". I don't really do it for idealistic purposes, but more for general business purposes. Part of the reason, along with everything else, is just that I move hardware and software around as needed, and I need to be able to move licenses of Office and Photoshop to different machines without problems.
However, if these corporate versions didn't exist, we would need to look for other alternatives, because it would add too much work to maintaining our systems. I'm already migrating to OpenOffice except for a few key people who need to communicate with clients who send MSO documents back and forth, in order to make sure there aren't any embarrassing formating flaws in our documents.
Yeah, I know a lot of musicians who claim that a lot of people find them through MySpace. Not that it's the only thing they do online. A lot of them make their own websites anyway, but MySpace is a good first way to get presence on the web, as well as being a way to link up with other bands.
You're off on many levels. I don't know what kind of people you work for, or how you misread what I wrote so dramatically, but the conversation would be more like this:
"Do you think we should upgrade to Vista?"
"No, I don't. It'll cost us lots of money inhibit our flexibility, possibly causing needless downtime. Plus, it doesn't offer us any benefits."
"Ok. What do you think we should do then?"
"Um... I'm thinking we should keep our old systems until they aren't serving our needs anymore, and then upgrade to Macintoshes."
"Really? Macintoshes? Cool. I like Macs. They're pretty."
"Yeah. And this plan would save us a lot of money in both software costs and support costs. Plus we don't have to worry about downtime due to "anti-piracy" stuff."
"Ok. Great. Keep up the good work."
The best part is, I'll be telling the truth the whole time.
I'll tolerate Firefox's checking for updates because I have no reason to believe that anything nefarious is going on, I can disable it, and in no foreseeable case will Firefox's developers purposefully sabotage Firefox in the update because they're trying to extort money from me.
That said, I still disable the automatic updates. I like having a button that says, "Check for updates". It makes it easy to update the software when I choose to do so. I hate automatic updates, however. Even assuming I trust them, they always seem to drain system/network resources at inopportune times.
And a printer driver looking for updates? I wouldn't tolerate that. If my printer is working, I don't need an update, unless it's a security issue. And if the printer is capable of causing a security issue, you need to change your OS.
I swap hardware plenty often enough to make software that requires activation a big PITA. When I need it done, sometimes, it's fairly urgent and I don't want to have to call Microsoft to get things reactivated.
I'll grant you that Microsoft isn't the worst offender of these "activation" schemes. I have software in house that requires activation, and if you reformat the same computer, reinstall on the same exact hardware, it won't recognize that it's the same computer and activation won't work. On the other hand, with this same software, if you reimage to a different hard drive and put it in the original computer, it will recognize that the hard drive is different and shut down. This company doesn't offer instructions on what to do if you have a problem with activation. They don't offer a public tech support phone number or e-mail address. The only way I've been able to reactivate it is to call their main line, get transferred 3 times, and get put on hold for an hour and a half.
So, yeah, it could be worse. I tolerate software that requires activation so long as they offer an "enterprise" version that doesn't have any of this "piracy protection", and that's what I'm doing with Windows, Office, Photoshop, etc. right now. That means you get to pay extra and jump through additional hoops for unbroken versions of their software. It's not ideal because you don't necessarily get OEM prices or the upgradability of retail versions, and though you can buy their "assurance", it means a yearly charge for "free" upgrades. Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn't released a new version of Windows in 5 years, and the new version they're supposed to release soon, I don't want. So once any "piracy protection" shows up in an enterprise version and prevents me from doing reasonable things, I am done putting up with it.
Well, the article is Slashdotted, but I don't need any expert opinion or research to tell me what it means for IT. I'm the head of an IT department, and it means that I'll be avoiding updates to any Microsoft technology with any "Piracy Prevention", and when I do need an upgrade, I'll be looking for Microsoft alternatives. I have friends who head IT departments, and I'm getting the same sentiment from them.
Not because we pirate. We're too afraid of the BSA sniffing around to do that. The problem is, these things cause problems, artificially created by Microsoft, for no reason. To stop piracy? If I pirated software, then I'd know where to find cracks for these things. Microsoft's "protection" wouldn't stop me.
But I've made a general policy in my department that we've stopped purchasing or installing software that requires "activation" or any other kind of phoning-home. I've run into too many problems where an otherwise working computer breaks itself by the developers own purposeful code because I've done a normal, legal repair job. In a large organization, an instance of the IT dept. replacing some hardware or imaging a disk shouldn't trigger a flag as "suspicious activity".
In my organization, I think we're likely to have more Macintosh purchases. Users like them, they're easy to fix, disk imaging is INCREDIBLY easy, they're reliable, and they work great with our Windows and Linux servers. And we'll see more Linux servers. If Microsoft wants my business back, they can stop trying to limit their OS to do less for me, and start working on how they can improve it to do more for me.
Yeah, I think about donating, and I think part of what prevents it is that it's not clear what I should do if I were to donate. First, there's a question of "how much and to whom?" I'm not rich, and I can't give tons of money. To be honest, I won't even be willing to donate the most I possibly could. I'd sooner by an XBox 360 or put it in a retirement fund. On the other hand, I agree that for all the benefit I get from FOSS, someone somewhere deserves something.
So I think that's part of the problem, in that there's not a clear directive. I've donated to freeware authors before when I've really liked their software, but only in instances where I happened to catch something on their website that said, "If you like this software, please donate $15 here" or something. See what I mean? That's a clear directive. But with FOSS, who do I give money to? I use a couple different Linux distros, with lots of different software, including Apache, Firefox, OOo. But I guess it's really still confused in my mind, who is really doing the work, how do I get money to them, and where is my money best spent?
I don't know, I'm not saying I will donate or won't, so don't hold me to it, but it just seems to me that it might help to raise money if there were someone authoritative who could say, "If you give $100 to this place, you've done your part." It would need to be someone who was honest, so you knew it wasn't a scam, and knowledgeable about the OSS scene, so that the money was going where it was needed, and not where it would be wasted. But this person would also need to be unbiased enough that you knew that he/she wasn't just favoring their friends or their own pet projects. As it is, I guess I could just donate to projects that I know I like-- Firefox for example. But are they really hurting for money?
I don't know. The landscape is too varied, too many projects are important, and my resources are too small.
That was my first thought when I saw the headline. I don't really talk to teenagers these days, so I don't know about MySpace, but some time ago I read about somebody's "theory of cool" (I can't remember where) that seemed pretty accurate. The idea is that there are stages that pretty much everything "cool" goes through, and it went something like this:
First it's underground. Practically nobody knows about it, but the people who know about it are the "cool kids".
The other kids start finding out about it, and it becomes generally known as "cool". By this time, most of the "cool kids" have actually already moved on to something else
It starts popping up in the mainstream, and then even the geeky kids know about it. The cool kids have already left, and most of the regular kids start leaving because the inclusion of geeky kids means it's not cool anymore.
Finally, when it hasn't been cool for months, parents, and older people in general, start figuring it out. It might appeal to them, or it might not, but this is the stage where your Grandpa tries to rap because he thinks it's funny.
Every now and then the whole things starts up again 10 or 20 years later when a new generation of cool kids take it up, and it becomes "retro".
I knew MySpace was heading in this direction, but there's one thing that might save it. Apparently it started out as a place for musicians and became a general social networking site, and as it has become less cool, it seems to be reverting to a place for musicians... And there it might continue to eek out enough profits to get by. But we all knew it wouldn't stay the cool place forever.
I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade. The key might be that, instead of planning to continue growing at ridiculous speeds, these sites might figure out how to squeeze everything they can out of the spike, and then degrade gracefully, either without any great loss or, if they're lucky, to become a minor fixture on the net.
On the other hand, I guess there's no incentive to do that. From the point of view of the owners, it's better to sell during the spike for a ridiculously high price, and let someone else deal with trying to keep the growth rate up on the now "uncool" venture. First Napster, now MySpace, next up, YouTube.
So you've picked one of my examples and pointed out that it probably doesn't make enough money from licensing to fund itself. Well, I wouldn't know about how much money Sun makes from licensing StarOffice, but they do license it. I don't see any reason to believe that the money earned from those licenses don't go back into the business model of OOo development, even if it's also subsidized by hardware sales, so I'm not sure that's a big difference.
Ah, but that's eye-candy in general, when I was talking about glass-effects.
But more seriously, each and every one of those updates were substantive. 10.0->10.1->10.2 greatly increased stability and usability. Think of it like moving from Windows NT 3.1 to Windows 2000, and that's the sort of difference you're talking about between 10.0 to 10.2. With both 10.3 and 10.4, in my opinion, each adds more usable features than the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Yes, I use things like FileVault, Expose, Spotlight, and Dashboard. It's not just that Apple made an encryption scheme, a search window, an adjustment to the windows management, and widgets, but they made these improvements well. They work well, and you don't have to go out of your way to find a use for them. Each update to OSX has made it run faster on the same hardware. 10.5? It remains to be seen how useful that update will be.
So if you choose to upgrade OSX, you'll get more than more eye-candy. However, I've been running Windows Vista for over a month now, and for the life of me, I can't find anything that makes it easier to use or substantially more feature-rich than XP. And when I talk about features, I mean features I can imagine using, beyond bug-fixes and security-fixes.
Ok, there's one feature I might find worthwhile, and that's the ability to roll back to previous versions of files. But is it worth the price of an upgrade? Not if you have sensible backups.
Yeah, my first thought when reading the headline was, could there be 3 companies that could join forces that I'd want less to do with? And then I thought, maybe.... CompUSA selling MP3 players based on..... LaCIE hard drives with music from.... Real. Nope, in this mad-lib I can't think of something worse than Real.
Anyone else have something better (worse)? _____________ selling MP3 players based on _____________ with Music from _____________.
However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
At the same time, it's arguable that what you're paying for with WoW isn't the software per se, but the access to the online world, without which the software is pretty useless.
However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.
Yeah, I've thought about this before. The problem is, even if they could contractually guarantee regular six-month updates, that doesn't speak to the usefulness or quality of those updates. You can release updates to software without those updates being particularly worthwhile. So either way, the problem remains: the subscription model doesn't offer the same incentive to the developer for making substantial improvements to their software.
If you think that the Vista is bad, imagine how much worse it would be if Microsoft had absolutely no economic interest it convincing people to buy the upgrade.
Point taken, but Google is a weird example. In a certain way, it isn't our service. What I mean is, I'm not a Google customer, even though I use their engine. Google's customers are the advertisers. Also, I'm not making perpetual payments on Google, which is the business model that the GP was talking about.
I definitely think there are people who want online spreadsheets.... for some things. Are there people who are satisfied to have all of their spreadsheets online, without the option of offline spreadsheets? Probably not many.
But how else is Microsoft going to get you accept paying more money every month for software they already have? It's a big problem in the software industry!
Think about it this way: the pre-release backlash on Vista has indicated that people might not be willing to pay $200 every couple of years for upgrades, no matter how many glass-effects those upgrades might have. Therefore, the only way to get people to pay money for software anymore is to make sure that your old software stops working when you stop paying. The only alternative would be that Microsoft goes out of business, which would be disastrous for everyone's economy. Did you see the report on how much Vista is going to benefit the EU economy?
Your characterization of the funding models is misleading. Yes, most programmers are paid for developing OSS, but they are not paid by revenue directly derived from the OSS product.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're funded indirectly. Some projects receive some kind of support from these commercial vendors, or benefit from other work that is receiving support. I wouldn't know how to gather data about how much of a benefit is derived from these commercial ventures, especially since the benefit can be indirect, and that is precisely why I didn't want to quibble about ratios.
Do you have a vast amount of research at your fingertips that would illuminate this? What code was contributed to which projects and by whom? Were they being paid by anyone at the time, and has a product been sold that includes that code? Did the code originate with the contributer, or was it copied from someplace else, and what was the commercial interest of the original code? It would be interesting to trace the origin and intent of code through several major OSS projects, but it seems to me that it'd be very difficult.
Yes, the are a lot of different kinds of development going on, and I'll say without any hesitation that there's plenty of code that was not written with any intent to sell that code in a commercial venture. I don't know how overwhelming that amount is, relative to stuff written for a commercial venture, and until someone has really studied it, I don't feel comfortable making any positive claim one way or the other. However, I do know that the companies that sell commercial OSS usually do employ programmers, which costs money. And that's what this discussion was about.
So it's not just Redhat and Troll Tech. It's also Novell, Mandriva, and other commercial Linux distros, Sun with OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, Novell again with programs like Evolution, various Exchange alternatives, and... well, a bunch more. I'm just thinking of things that I actually use or have evaluated. The companies that sell commercial OSS generally help fund the project they're using as a base, as well as having paid programmers.
Really, I'm not trying to discount other people's submissions, but just suggesting that we shouldn't ignore the benefit that the FOSS community gains from commercial funding and contributions. It's not nothing, and though these companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, it's also not "free". It costs these companies money. So that's why their products cost money.
Sure, and Gmail is "free". For small numbers of users, hosted solutions will often be cheaper. For my web site, I used a shared host, because I can spend a couple dollars a month. That's way cheaper than building a server and having a T1 strung to my apartment, and easier too.
But these solutions don't always scale. In a larger company the loss of control alone will be sufficient to dissuade your IT staff from employing the $13 a month hosted Exchange solution. It's different business models for different people with different needs, and has nothing to do with whether it's FOSS.
I'm not saying Redhat is good or does everything the way I'd like them to. I'm just saying that the reasons they charge "a lot" (if you consider it a lot) for their software include development costs.
Of course you can't expect support if you haven't paid anyone for support. I will mention that I've gotten some great free help for things from various people over the internet, and it was easier to find useful answers in Gentoo forums, for example, than from Microsoft.
However, the text you quoted was not talking about support, but rather who is writing FOSS. The fact is that a lot of that free Linux code has been written by people at companies like Redhat, Novell, IBM, and Google, and those contributions were paid for by revenue of those companies' commercial projects.
Sure, lots of code has been written by the good Samaritans as well, and I wouldn't want to downplay those contributions. However, the question was asked, "Why does Redhat charge so much for software that is free?" and nobody was addressing the issue that Redhat does spend money on development. They employ programmers and help fund projects, and that money needs to come from somewhere. So just like any other commercial software shop, Redhat spends money on marketing, development, research, etc. The fact that they can draw on the open source community does help them quite a lot, but it also means that they users can use their software for free, and competitors can benefit from their work. So the business model is complicated, but they do in fact incur development costs, and need to make money somehow.
Lots of people pay for software without specifically wanting support. First, you have consumers who don't really know how to pirate or get around activation schemes. Also, there are businesses for whom the cost of a license is cheaper than a visit from the BSA. Gosh, there are even people for whom paying for the software they use is a moral issue.
Redhat, on the other hand, has given moral and legal permission to use their software for free. I myself have purchased copies of Windows and Photoshop, but downloaded Linux and GIMP without paying anything. Maybe I'll donate some money to the projects one of these days, but I don't anticipate paying for Redhat anytime soon. However, everything else being equal, if there were no FOSS Linux distros available, would I be willing to buy a copy of Redhat? Probably.
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You're not making sense. I didn't bring up Troll Tech. I was using Redhat and Novell as examples, and someone else brought up Troll Tech as someone else who sold OSS. And like I said, i don't know exactly how much profit Sun makes off of OpenOffice, but they do sell licenses. Star Office fits the model I was talking about where a software vendor helps fund development on a FOSS so they can use it as a base for a commercial product, which they in turn sell to the general public. Whether it's a very profitable business is irrelevant, it's a business that Sun participates in.
I'm specifically not trying to be involved in anyone's discussions of their personal OSS pet-peeves.
Well, to be honest, I haven't been able to stick to the policy 100%, but it is a general rule. We do use Office 2003 and Adobe products, but only the corporate licenses that doesn't require activation, or anything else that binds the software to specific hardware. It's really for business purposes, not idealism, so the corporate versions satisfy the requirement that they "don't require activation or phoning-home". I don't really do it for idealistic purposes, but more for general business purposes. Part of the reason, along with everything else, is just that I move hardware and software around as needed, and I need to be able to move licenses of Office and Photoshop to different machines without problems.
However, if these corporate versions didn't exist, we would need to look for other alternatives, because it would add too much work to maintaining our systems. I'm already migrating to OpenOffice except for a few key people who need to communicate with clients who send MSO documents back and forth, in order to make sure there aren't any embarrassing formating flaws in our documents.
Yeah, I know a lot of musicians who claim that a lot of people find them through MySpace. Not that it's the only thing they do online. A lot of them make their own websites anyway, but MySpace is a good first way to get presence on the web, as well as being a way to link up with other bands.
You're off on many levels. I don't know what kind of people you work for, or how you misread what I wrote so dramatically, but the conversation would be more like this:
"Do you think we should upgrade to Vista?"
"No, I don't. It'll cost us lots of money inhibit our flexibility, possibly causing needless downtime. Plus, it doesn't offer us any benefits."
"Ok. What do you think we should do then?"
"Um... I'm thinking we should keep our old systems until they aren't serving our needs anymore, and then upgrade to Macintoshes."
"Really? Macintoshes? Cool. I like Macs. They're pretty."
"Yeah. And this plan would save us a lot of money in both software costs and support costs. Plus we don't have to worry about downtime due to "anti-piracy" stuff."
"Ok. Great. Keep up the good work."
The best part is, I'll be telling the truth the whole time.
I'll tolerate Firefox's checking for updates because I have no reason to believe that anything nefarious is going on, I can disable it, and in no foreseeable case will Firefox's developers purposefully sabotage Firefox in the update because they're trying to extort money from me.
That said, I still disable the automatic updates. I like having a button that says, "Check for updates". It makes it easy to update the software when I choose to do so. I hate automatic updates, however. Even assuming I trust them, they always seem to drain system/network resources at inopportune times.
And a printer driver looking for updates? I wouldn't tolerate that. If my printer is working, I don't need an update, unless it's a security issue. And if the printer is capable of causing a security issue, you need to change your OS.
I swap hardware plenty often enough to make software that requires activation a big PITA. When I need it done, sometimes, it's fairly urgent and I don't want to have to call Microsoft to get things reactivated.
I'll grant you that Microsoft isn't the worst offender of these "activation" schemes. I have software in house that requires activation, and if you reformat the same computer, reinstall on the same exact hardware, it won't recognize that it's the same computer and activation won't work. On the other hand, with this same software, if you reimage to a different hard drive and put it in the original computer, it will recognize that the hard drive is different and shut down. This company doesn't offer instructions on what to do if you have a problem with activation. They don't offer a public tech support phone number or e-mail address. The only way I've been able to reactivate it is to call their main line, get transferred 3 times, and get put on hold for an hour and a half.
So, yeah, it could be worse. I tolerate software that requires activation so long as they offer an "enterprise" version that doesn't have any of this "piracy protection", and that's what I'm doing with Windows, Office, Photoshop, etc. right now. That means you get to pay extra and jump through additional hoops for unbroken versions of their software. It's not ideal because you don't necessarily get OEM prices or the upgradability of retail versions, and though you can buy their "assurance", it means a yearly charge for "free" upgrades. Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn't released a new version of Windows in 5 years, and the new version they're supposed to release soon, I don't want. So once any "piracy protection" shows up in an enterprise version and prevents me from doing reasonable things, I am done putting up with it.
Couldn't tell you. These days, I'm one of the "old people", and cool kids generally don't tell us what they're up to.
Well, the article is Slashdotted, but I don't need any expert opinion or research to tell me what it means for IT. I'm the head of an IT department, and it means that I'll be avoiding updates to any Microsoft technology with any "Piracy Prevention", and when I do need an upgrade, I'll be looking for Microsoft alternatives. I have friends who head IT departments, and I'm getting the same sentiment from them.
Not because we pirate. We're too afraid of the BSA sniffing around to do that. The problem is, these things cause problems, artificially created by Microsoft, for no reason. To stop piracy? If I pirated software, then I'd know where to find cracks for these things. Microsoft's "protection" wouldn't stop me.
But I've made a general policy in my department that we've stopped purchasing or installing software that requires "activation" or any other kind of phoning-home. I've run into too many problems where an otherwise working computer breaks itself by the developers own purposeful code because I've done a normal, legal repair job. In a large organization, an instance of the IT dept. replacing some hardware or imaging a disk shouldn't trigger a flag as "suspicious activity".
In my organization, I think we're likely to have more Macintosh purchases. Users like them, they're easy to fix, disk imaging is INCREDIBLY easy, they're reliable, and they work great with our Windows and Linux servers. And we'll see more Linux servers. If Microsoft wants my business back, they can stop trying to limit their OS to do less for me, and start working on how they can improve it to do more for me.
Yeah, I think about donating, and I think part of what prevents it is that it's not clear what I should do if I were to donate. First, there's a question of "how much and to whom?" I'm not rich, and I can't give tons of money. To be honest, I won't even be willing to donate the most I possibly could. I'd sooner by an XBox 360 or put it in a retirement fund. On the other hand, I agree that for all the benefit I get from FOSS, someone somewhere deserves something.
So I think that's part of the problem, in that there's not a clear directive. I've donated to freeware authors before when I've really liked their software, but only in instances where I happened to catch something on their website that said, "If you like this software, please donate $15 here" or something. See what I mean? That's a clear directive. But with FOSS, who do I give money to? I use a couple different Linux distros, with lots of different software, including Apache, Firefox, OOo. But I guess it's really still confused in my mind, who is really doing the work, how do I get money to them, and where is my money best spent?
I don't know, I'm not saying I will donate or won't, so don't hold me to it, but it just seems to me that it might help to raise money if there were someone authoritative who could say, "If you give $100 to this place, you've done your part." It would need to be someone who was honest, so you knew it wasn't a scam, and knowledgeable about the OSS scene, so that the money was going where it was needed, and not where it would be wasted. But this person would also need to be unbiased enough that you knew that he/she wasn't just favoring their friends or their own pet projects. As it is, I guess I could just donate to projects that I know I like-- Firefox for example. But are they really hurting for money?
I don't know. The landscape is too varied, too many projects are important, and my resources are too small.
That was my first thought when I saw the headline. I don't really talk to teenagers these days, so I don't know about MySpace, but some time ago I read about somebody's "theory of cool" (I can't remember where) that seemed pretty accurate. The idea is that there are stages that pretty much everything "cool" goes through, and it went something like this:
I knew MySpace was heading in this direction, but there's one thing that might save it. Apparently it started out as a place for musicians and became a general social networking site, and as it has become less cool, it seems to be reverting to a place for musicians... And there it might continue to eek out enough profits to get by. But we all knew it wouldn't stay the cool place forever.
I've wondered, in fact, if this might become a new business model in the new internet economy. A "hit of the moment with planned obsolescence". It seems to me that everything cool dies off, and internet fads spike quickly and then degrade. The key might be that, instead of planning to continue growing at ridiculous speeds, these sites might figure out how to squeeze everything they can out of the spike, and then degrade gracefully, either without any great loss or, if they're lucky, to become a minor fixture on the net.
On the other hand, I guess there's no incentive to do that. From the point of view of the owners, it's better to sell during the spike for a ridiculously high price, and let someone else deal with trying to keep the growth rate up on the now "uncool" venture. First Napster, now MySpace, next up, YouTube.
So you've picked one of my examples and pointed out that it probably doesn't make enough money from licensing to fund itself. Well, I wouldn't know about how much money Sun makes from licensing StarOffice, but they do license it. I don't see any reason to believe that the money earned from those licenses don't go back into the business model of OOo development, even if it's also subsidized by hardware sales, so I'm not sure that's a big difference.
I was. I hated the guy who swept the floor.
Looking at the crap that gets sold on eBay, I think someone else already figured this out.
Ah, but that's eye-candy in general, when I was talking about glass-effects.
But more seriously, each and every one of those updates were substantive. 10.0->10.1->10.2 greatly increased stability and usability. Think of it like moving from Windows NT 3.1 to Windows 2000, and that's the sort of difference you're talking about between 10.0 to 10.2. With both 10.3 and 10.4, in my opinion, each adds more usable features than the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Yes, I use things like FileVault, Expose, Spotlight, and Dashboard. It's not just that Apple made an encryption scheme, a search window, an adjustment to the windows management, and widgets, but they made these improvements well. They work well, and you don't have to go out of your way to find a use for them. Each update to OSX has made it run faster on the same hardware. 10.5? It remains to be seen how useful that update will be.
So if you choose to upgrade OSX, you'll get more than more eye-candy. However, I've been running Windows Vista for over a month now, and for the life of me, I can't find anything that makes it easier to use or substantially more feature-rich than XP. And when I talk about features, I mean features I can imagine using, beyond bug-fixes and security-fixes.
Ok, there's one feature I might find worthwhile, and that's the ability to roll back to previous versions of files. But is it worth the price of an upgrade? Not if you have sensible backups.
Yeah, my first thought when reading the headline was, could there be 3 companies that could join forces that I'd want less to do with? And then I thought, maybe.... CompUSA selling MP3 players based on..... LaCIE hard drives with music from.... Real. Nope, in this mad-lib I can't think of something worse than Real.
Anyone else have something better (worse)? _____________ selling MP3 players based on _____________ with Music from _____________.
However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
At the same time, it's arguable that what you're paying for with WoW isn't the software per se, but the access to the online world, without which the software is pretty useless.
However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.
Yeah, I've thought about this before. The problem is, even if they could contractually guarantee regular six-month updates, that doesn't speak to the usefulness or quality of those updates. You can release updates to software without those updates being particularly worthwhile. So either way, the problem remains: the subscription model doesn't offer the same incentive to the developer for making substantial improvements to their software.
If you think that the Vista is bad, imagine how much worse it would be if Microsoft had absolutely no economic interest it convincing people to buy the upgrade.
Point taken, but Google is a weird example. In a certain way, it isn't our service. What I mean is, I'm not a Google customer, even though I use their engine. Google's customers are the advertisers. Also, I'm not making perpetual payments on Google, which is the business model that the GP was talking about.
I definitely think there are people who want online spreadsheets.... for some things. Are there people who are satisfied to have all of their spreadsheets online, without the option of offline spreadsheets? Probably not many.
But how else is Microsoft going to get you accept paying more money every month for software they already have? It's a big problem in the software industry!
Think about it this way: the pre-release backlash on Vista has indicated that people might not be willing to pay $200 every couple of years for upgrades, no matter how many glass-effects those upgrades might have. Therefore, the only way to get people to pay money for software anymore is to make sure that your old software stops working when you stop paying. The only alternative would be that Microsoft goes out of business, which would be disastrous for everyone's economy. Did you see the report on how much Vista is going to benefit the EU economy?
I rest my case.
Your characterization of the funding models is misleading. Yes, most programmers are paid for developing OSS, but they are not paid by revenue directly derived from the OSS product.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're funded indirectly. Some projects receive some kind of support from these commercial vendors, or benefit from other work that is receiving support. I wouldn't know how to gather data about how much of a benefit is derived from these commercial ventures, especially since the benefit can be indirect, and that is precisely why I didn't want to quibble about ratios.
Do you have a vast amount of research at your fingertips that would illuminate this? What code was contributed to which projects and by whom? Were they being paid by anyone at the time, and has a product been sold that includes that code? Did the code originate with the contributer, or was it copied from someplace else, and what was the commercial interest of the original code? It would be interesting to trace the origin and intent of code through several major OSS projects, but it seems to me that it'd be very difficult.
Yes, the are a lot of different kinds of development going on, and I'll say without any hesitation that there's plenty of code that was not written with any intent to sell that code in a commercial venture. I don't know how overwhelming that amount is, relative to stuff written for a commercial venture, and until someone has really studied it, I don't feel comfortable making any positive claim one way or the other. However, I do know that the companies that sell commercial OSS usually do employ programmers, which costs money. And that's what this discussion was about.
So it's not just Redhat and Troll Tech. It's also Novell, Mandriva, and other commercial Linux distros, Sun with OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, Novell again with programs like Evolution, various Exchange alternatives, and... well, a bunch more. I'm just thinking of things that I actually use or have evaluated. The companies that sell commercial OSS generally help fund the project they're using as a base, as well as having paid programmers.
Really, I'm not trying to discount other people's submissions, but just suggesting that we shouldn't ignore the benefit that the FOSS community gains from commercial funding and contributions. It's not nothing, and though these companies aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, it's also not "free". It costs these companies money. So that's why their products cost money.
Sure, and Gmail is "free". For small numbers of users, hosted solutions will often be cheaper. For my web site, I used a shared host, because I can spend a couple dollars a month. That's way cheaper than building a server and having a T1 strung to my apartment, and easier too.
But these solutions don't always scale. In a larger company the loss of control alone will be sufficient to dissuade your IT staff from employing the $13 a month hosted Exchange solution. It's different business models for different people with different needs, and has nothing to do with whether it's FOSS.
I'm not saying Redhat is good or does everything the way I'd like them to. I'm just saying that the reasons they charge "a lot" (if you consider it a lot) for their software include development costs.
Of course you can't expect support if you haven't paid anyone for support. I will mention that I've gotten some great free help for things from various people over the internet, and it was easier to find useful answers in Gentoo forums, for example, than from Microsoft.
However, the text you quoted was not talking about support, but rather who is writing FOSS. The fact is that a lot of that free Linux code has been written by people at companies like Redhat, Novell, IBM, and Google, and those contributions were paid for by revenue of those companies' commercial projects.
Sure, lots of code has been written by the good Samaritans as well, and I wouldn't want to downplay those contributions. However, the question was asked, "Why does Redhat charge so much for software that is free?" and nobody was addressing the issue that Redhat does spend money on development. They employ programmers and help fund projects, and that money needs to come from somewhere. So just like any other commercial software shop, Redhat spends money on marketing, development, research, etc. The fact that they can draw on the open source community does help them quite a lot, but it also means that they users can use their software for free, and competitors can benefit from their work. So the business model is complicated, but they do in fact incur development costs, and need to make money somehow.
Microsoft offers support and training included in the cost of a license in Windows? I've never heard of that.
Lots of people pay for software without specifically wanting support. First, you have consumers who don't really know how to pirate or get around activation schemes. Also, there are businesses for whom the cost of a license is cheaper than a visit from the BSA. Gosh, there are even people for whom paying for the software they use is a moral issue.
Redhat, on the other hand, has given moral and legal permission to use their software for free. I myself have purchased copies of Windows and Photoshop, but downloaded Linux and GIMP without paying anything. Maybe I'll donate some money to the projects one of these days, but I don't anticipate paying for Redhat anytime soon. However, everything else being equal, if there were no FOSS Linux distros available, would I be willing to buy a copy of Redhat? Probably.