Re: [tlug] Hula

[Ulrich Plate <plate@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> I'd definitely like to hear somebody besides me talk about it; I'm
> getting bored myself, and definitely my ideas are going stale.  

There isn't anything exciting about this. The only thing that baffles
me is how long it took some of the corporations to catch on, and how
erratic they go about their newly adopted strategies. Boiling it down
to what happened that made them move in this direction in the first
place, you're left with Novell looking at how much money IBM was making
from consulting (80 percent of total turnover) as opposed to spending
money on closed source development, and then they must have compared
the measly growth rate of their own Netware contracts and the 50
percent year-on-year upward mobility that SuSE was displaying thanks to
software that didn't cost anything. Any CFO worth his stock options
will know what to do then. 

> Also, it sounds like the environments in the U.S. and Europe are quite
> different, as are the business approaches.  I'd like to hear more
> about Europe, as I'm more familiar with the U.S., but in some ways
> Japan's business environment resembles Europe's more than the U.S.'s.

Yes and no. Maybe part of the difference lies in the ability to see
that open source isn't just a way for corporations to make money, but
also for the individual open-source developers. There's a very
interesting research report* that implicitly helps understanding this
aspect, written by three economists of a German university who set out
to prove that involvement in open-source projects creates a vector
signalling excellence to prospective employers, resulting in a deferred
pay-off that's much higher than the wages of their closed-source
colleagues. The model even has room for lesser-skilled mere debuggers
like myself, driven only by altruism and/or vanity... 

> March 12 is open, I hear.
> 
>     Ulrich> my travel expenses and a reasonable consulting fee will
>     Ulrich> buy you quite satisfactory answers, I believe. :)
> 
> *psssh*

I'll take that as the sound of disappointment for my being 8,000
kilometres away. :)

Cheers
Ulrich Plate
* http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/leemoisaweiss.pdf

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