Re: OSS and getting money for it (was: [tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks)

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:49:17 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> In other words, profitable OSS development almost always comes with
> "IP by other means" such as trade secrets, lack of documentation of
> what the feature is "really for", or general uselessness except to one
> customer.  Eg, Motorola's PPC business does not benefit from a GCC
> peephole optimization that uses an Intel-specific instruction.  If you
> can catch an ex-Cygnus GCC developer, they will tell you that getting
> chip vendors to fund work on code generation for their own chips was
> easy, but that the art of being Cygnus was getting them to pay for
> generic optimizations and feature implementation.

Interesting. MPlayer and FFmpeg are known to generate
quite a bit of revenue when used in a comercial product
(easy to use, well documented) and at time quite a bit
of this money is flowing back to the projects.

Eg. last LinuxTag a certain US based company paid
for quite a big portion of the teams dinners. And
this just because they successfully finished a project
using FFmpeg.

Ofcourse, this is nowhere near the "production costs"
of FFmpeg or what you'd get if you'd sell it commercialy.
But it is still something if you keep in mind that nobody
asked them to pay anything.

		Attila Kinali

-- 
Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!
                         -- Deed of Morred