I believe much of the power of open source development is that it allows organizations to develop custom in-house applications. Instead of being stuck with a proprietary system that may, or may not, work exactly for their purposes they have the option of hiring developers to produce exactly what they need. While there obviously is little area for profit for software vendors (short of aforementioned selling of set-up, support), it allows a lot of organizations (e.g. research labs, many college institutions) function more efficently, etc. In short, the money (in most cases) can be found in gained efficency.
Also, as refernce, note how much documentation on tldp.org there is that was written by people encouraged by their companies to do so, allowing for a win-win situation -- for the people who got to spend company time writting up public documentation, and that next time issues come along in the company (or others) their will be documentation to help them through.
This is really just more meaningless litigation to tie up legal recources in this country. The MPAA or RIAA can accept it or not, but people are always going to be able to get around copywrite laws, and the like -- they may close one door, but another will always be opened. If litigation and regulation did anything than Napster would have been the end of music sharing as we know it. Pointing the finger at the protocols used to share copywritted media is a futile effort to force people to pay outlandish prices for that media. Personally, I would much rather download an artists album over the internet and send the artists themselves $16, than go to a store and buy a $16 cd of which the artist may see 25 cents of. But if the RIAA would like to lower prices of cds to $5-8 and assure me that a good portion of that is going to the artist themselves (not some distribution companies profit margin), or lower my movie ticket price $3, or make dvds never cost more than $9, I would stop downloading all-together. Sure, copywrite infringement may be against the law, but so it high-way robbery.
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I believe much of the power of open source development is that it allows organizations to develop custom in-house applications. Instead of being stuck with a proprietary system that may, or may not, work exactly for their purposes they have the option of hiring developers to produce exactly what they need. While there obviously is little area for profit for software vendors (short of aforementioned selling of set-up, support), it allows a lot of organizations (e.g. research labs, many college institutions) function more efficently, etc. In short, the money (in most cases) can be found in gained efficency. Also, as refernce, note how much documentation on tldp.org there is that was written by people encouraged by their companies to do so, allowing for a win-win situation -- for the people who got to spend company time writting up public documentation, and that next time issues come along in the company (or others) their will be documentation to help them through.
This is really just more meaningless litigation to tie up legal recources in this country. The MPAA or RIAA can accept it or not, but people are always going to be able to get around copywrite laws, and the like -- they may close one door, but another will always be opened. If litigation and regulation did anything than Napster would have been the end of music sharing as we know it. Pointing the finger at the protocols used to share copywritted media is a futile effort to force people to pay outlandish prices for that media. Personally, I would much rather download an artists album over the internet and send the artists themselves $16, than go to a store and buy a $16 cd of which the artist may see 25 cents of. But if the RIAA would like to lower prices of cds to $5-8 and assure me that a good portion of that is going to the artist themselves (not some distribution companies profit margin), or lower my movie ticket price $3, or make dvds never cost more than $9, I would stop downloading all-together. Sure, copywrite infringement may be against the law, but so it high-way robbery.