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

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

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Hmm.. I don't know whether giving away the major asset (ie IP)
 > is that much of a problem.

I assure you, it is.  Remember, from the owner's purely selfish point
of view, it's just an asset, and anything that makes giving away IP
"not much of a problem" would do the same thing for your house.  Would
you give that away?

 > > That's a reasonable point of view for the developer, but it's just
 > > plain wrong if you've got a million people willing to pay $1 for a 1
 > > man-year project, but no way to collect from more than 10,000 of them.
 > 
 > That's a logistic problem at most.

Actually, no, it's not.  Feel free to tell that to the 10s of millions
of Africans and others waiting for the money spent on $10 malaria
drugs to hit 100 million dollars a year, while drugs aimed at
palliative care at $50,000 a pop for a million rich-world AIDS
patients gets about 5 billion a year for R&D.  Malaria kills more
people every year than AIDS does, even if you count the millions of
HIV carriers in Africa who will never see the business end of a Pfizer
syringe.  But you'd never know it from the drug company R&D budgets.
(Curiously enough, the William and Melinda Gates Foundation is
contributing a lot of money to malaria research.)

 > Thus, you should at least reformulate your argument in a way that
 > it doesnt contain development anymore. Otherwise i agree, if you
 > give your "product" away for free, you cannot sell it anymore.

Again, that's the whole enchilada.  Developers should be paid to
develop.  Any time they spend doing less productive things is a waste.

 > I guess that to some extent so few people are paid for OSS development,
 > because they just want to keep it as a hobby (at least i am one of
 > those).

Well, if you're at all good, the world should (for its own good) try
to pay you enough to do a fair amount of work past the point where
you're enjoying it.  (This is a theorem of economics; I am not joking.)

If you are very good and not getting paid enough to go past the point
of "just a hobby", we call that "market failure."