Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 23, 2004 10:55 PM
Ah, yes. Another armchair quarterback.
I never said FOSS is "going away." I said it is self-destructive to those in the software industry. Foregoing a competitive advantage (location for a restaurant, IP for a software company) is economic suicide. Go read "The Discipline of Market Leaders." Foregoing "product leadership" (where you can both capitalize upon your IP and leverage it into service work if desired), and releasing source code so that you must compete upon the basis of "operational efficiency" and enabling competitors by giving them your source code starts a race to the bottom.
Software costs are substantial in terms of "porting the solution forward" -- go read Manny Lehman's work on software complexity, and marginal effort to produce marginal progress.
With regard to sending development and support to India, we do not do that, and we are only able to avoid trying to compete upon operational efficiency BECAUSE we retain our IP. When we do foreign jobs, it is kind of counter-intuitive, but we have great success selling product, and limited success selling labor due to order-of-magnitude differences in cost structures. If our products were open source, then we would incur costs for developing them, and never realize revenue for so doing.
FOSS may be inevitable only because of the market's reaction to a monopoly ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- but sometime's it's not true -- Stalin vs Hitler, Stallman vs Ballmer/Gates). I do not advocate "outlawing" FOSS except in the case of taxpayer-supported efforts covered by anti-commercial (aka "polluting") licenses such as the GPL. Taxpayer supported work should be either public domain, or MIT/BSD licensed.
With respect to "standardized data/comm protocols," go read "Computer Wars."
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:Article completely misses the point.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 23, 2004 10:55 PMI never said FOSS is "going away." I said it is self-destructive to those in the software industry. Foregoing a competitive advantage (location for a restaurant, IP for a software company) is economic suicide. Go read "The Discipline of Market Leaders." Foregoing "product leadership" (where you can both capitalize upon your IP and leverage it into service work if desired), and releasing source code so that you must compete upon the basis of "operational efficiency" and enabling competitors by giving them your source code starts a race to the bottom.
Software costs are substantial in terms of "porting the solution forward" -- go read Manny Lehman's work on software complexity, and marginal effort to produce marginal progress.
With regard to sending development and support to India, we do not do that, and we are only able to avoid trying to compete upon operational efficiency BECAUSE we retain our IP. When we do foreign jobs, it is kind of counter-intuitive, but we have great success selling product, and limited success selling labor due to order-of-magnitude differences in cost structures. If our products were open source, then we would incur costs for developing them, and never realize revenue for so doing.
FOSS may be inevitable only because of the market's reaction to a monopoly ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- but sometime's it's not true -- Stalin vs Hitler, Stallman vs Ballmer/Gates). I do not advocate "outlawing" FOSS except in the case of taxpayer-supported efforts covered by anti-commercial (aka "polluting") licenses such as the GPL. Taxpayer supported work should be either public domain, or MIT/BSD licensed.
With respect to "standardized data/comm protocols," go read "Computer Wars."
#