Re: [tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks (was: linux: it's becoming ubiquitous)

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

Attila Kinali writes:

 > On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:30:08 +0900
 > "Gernot Hassenpflug" <aikishugyo@example.com> wrote:

 > > My friends who run businesses answer this with 'because there are so
 > > many criminals it absolutely has to be done to protect the creators,
 > > else no-one would create anything for commercial purposes'.

This is pure greed speaking.  There is so much friction in the world
that a business can be made out of many things created for the fun of
it, but you have to hustle a lot.  It's called a "life-style
business", and it works fine for people who wish to release their code
as open source as well as for people who wish to produce organically
or promote employment of women or people of color, and so on.  They
just have to work harder and accept lower incomes than, say, Gordon
Gecko.

It's not about the creators.  Even Jefferson knew that creative people
do it because creating is what they do.  They'd die without it.  What
is well-known but understood by almost no open source advocates
without a PhD in economics is that IP is all about the capitalists.

The problem is that if IP doesn't exist, then the capitalists will get
ripped off every time (on pure bright ideas) because all they do is
inject money; they rarely bring anything else to the table, and
developers are not allowed to sell their talents in exclusive
contracts the baseball players are (non-competition clause, yes, you
may not write code except for us, no).  So developers can just walk,
leaving the VCs with nothing.  If you want access to VCs' money, you
can't go around undermining their investment by giving away the store.
>From the point of view of VCs, open source licensing by the developers
they support is basically equivalent to "five-finger discounts" on a
candy bar to friends of the kid working the register.

The only way to get VCs interested in open source development is going
to be building a successful business around it first.  That's a lot
harder for all concerned than going to them with a patent or a
copyrighted program.

 > > This tells me that creating something for commercial purposes is
 > > a lot more expensive in total than simply creating something that
 > > is useful.

Exactly.  The devil is in the details, if you want a mass market.

 > > Commercial products always give a "service" (for pay) while
 > > simultaneously "refusing to give a/several service/s" in the
 > > sense that you have a take-it-or-leave-it option only, not a
 > > choice about the best for yourself.

This is simply not true.  Even Microsoft gives many options as to how
you can legally install Windows.  It's true that Microsoft will refuse
to provide many services on which it can make money, but that's true
of any business.

If you visit the bug trackers and users lists of any open source
project, you will find many many complaints that the product doesn't
do the right thing.  This is just as much a refusal to provide a
service as anything Microsoft does, and most users are not capable of
doing it for themselves.

As Mark Shuttleworth pointed out bluntly at BALUG last week, whatever
else you say about Microsoft, there's one thing you can't take away
from them: they made software cheap for the masses.  This is not true
of open source, not yet, and maybe never.

 > I strongly disagree. It's the currently used bussines model
 > that demands a closed and well controlled distribution system
 > for software. If you choose a different bussines model you can
 > still make money even if you give away the software for free
 > if the product you sell is not the software itself.

But how about all the people who are screwed because the features they
need are not relevant to your business model, so you won't produce
them, and neither does anybody else?

 > Of course, under the condition that the bussines model works.

Which is an extremely strong condition.  Again, at BALUG Mark S said,
"we don't know how to design working business models for open source
yet."

 > Now, that you have to explain. What do you mean exactly by
 > "academic AND western scientific enviroment" vs
 > "academic AND humanities" ?

Probably that the greed of a Marxian humanities professor for the
salary that is earned by business, law, and medical professors knows
no bound, and he doesn't understand why it will never happen. :-)