Re: [tlug] Linux / MacOS X and dv cameras

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Lyle H Saxon writes:

 > In conclusion, I must disagree with this absolutist statement:
 > 
 > > The point is just I know that they play the same
 > > incompatibility game that all Japanese mfrs do if they think they can.

[NB: that's a conditional statement on the face of it.]

 > Nearly all companies want to make money (don't make me explain the
 > subsidiary companies set up to deliberately fail for tax purposes),
 > and doing the wrong thing isn't always profitable!

My point is that I can't imagine any Japanese company doing *as the
market leader* what IBM did with the original PC (open architecture
that anybody could plug into).  Sure, you can give examples like
Pentax's lens socket, but as far as I know Pentax was never a
candidate for market leader, not at the level that IBM, Dell, and SONY
play in the PC market.

The reason I worry about this is that I think Japan as a whole does
not "get" free software or open standards as business strategies.

Certainly Sharp seriously forked the Zaurus.  AFAIK they sold almost
no add-on software to speak of (eventually they even had to bundle the
dictionaries), and only the comms peripherals and memory (both pretty
standard CF/SD devices) sold at all well.  So they had absolutely
nothing to lose, and a lot to gain, by *enabling* a thriving OSS
segment for that device.  But they didn't.