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

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:38:31 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> 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?


Oh.. ok. Haven't seen that point.
So, to make OSS comercialy success full one has to make the
giving away part an economic advantage... which might be very
hard.

 
>  > > 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.)

This isn't the same problem IMHO. That malaria doesn't get
as much attention from the pharma industry can quite simply
get explained by looking at what would return more money
when hitting the market: millions of poor people who have
barely enough to eat or a few thousand filthy rich people
who did a mistake once upon a time and want to cover up for it.

>  > 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.

Yes and no. A developer who only develops and doesn't see
left nor right is not a good developer IMHO. If you have
no clue what's going on outside your square monitor, you
cannot solve the porblems your users have.

But i agree that developers should mostly do development.

>  > 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.)

Hmm.. interesting...
I've never paid so far enough to motivate me more than what
i get by the work i do motivates me anyways. Ok, that might
be due to the problem that money is a very bad motivator
for me, as long as i have enough to live (which isn't
difficult to earn if you are an engineer in central europe).

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

I don't know whether i'm very good (i actually don't think so),
but my hobbies always motivate me more than my work. :-)


			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