On Jul 16, 6:05 am, "Moshe Goldfarb." <brick_n_st...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:45:59 -0700, The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
> > Note subject change.
> I can get shit for free too by stepping in the right place when crossing
> the street.
And if you keep your eyes open, you might also find a penny, a nickle,
or even quarter somewhere in the crosswalk or on the sidewalk.
Luck or Success is when preparedness meets opportunity. Opportunity
is there all the time, but only the prepared can recognize it as such.
> I'm talking about when/if he gets a real job...
Many of the posters in this group have real jobs, and make money
SUPPORTING OSS. Often there is a BLEND of OSS and proprietary
software that leads to the most cost-effective solution to business
problems.
Many of the applications in OSS were tools created by system
administrators or consultants who created the tools as part of solving
a particular business problem. PERL for example was written to more
easily scan "plain text" documents for information that needed to be
loaded into databases. Since then, PERL has parsed millions of
documents into data warehouses all over the world.
Most of the enhancements, such most of the CPAN extensions, were just
quicker ways to get key elements parsed, or quicker ways to get them
into the database. They were developed base on the experiences of
people who had real-world problems and didn't want to spend several
thousand hours doing copy/paste from document to form, especially if
the work had to be done by a $100/hour consultant.
> Schestowitz invents a way for cars to get 10000 miles/gallon.
> Will he give it away for free?
The example above is very real. If I can eliminate 20,000 hours of
labor by using PERL, it makes sense to do so. If the problem is very
general, I might even publish the source code (with permission of my
employer).
In other cases, the problem is very specific and only addresses a very
small group of customers. For example, turning HIPPA/EDI medical
records into HIPPA/XML records is a very specialized need. If we have
an engagement which requires us to do this, we can use an adapter that
has been used on several similar projects to save the customer
thousands of hours of coding and testing the adapter by hand.
> Will he give the method away for free?
IBM gave away Eclipse, Jikes, and several other utilities for free,
and the investment has paid off handsomely. There are now
thousands of applications which run under Eclipse, which make
it easy for us to interact more efficiently with our customers.
Sun gave away NFS, RPC, and source to Java libraries, they also offer
free Java Runtime environments, and Java compilers. The result is
that Java is now on over 1 billion devices ranging from PCs to Cell
Phones, and many of those Java devices interact with Solaris servers.
> No way....
>
> He will trot right to his lawyers and protect it.
Actually, it took a few lawyers to figure out the GPL. Even if you
want to "Give it away" there are things you have to do to protect
yourself legally. If you just put the code in "Public Domain" you
might find that you've taken on liability that you hadn't intended.
> Just like Mark Kent does...
> You're all over the place Ghost...
> This is a simple concept that you are turning into a clusterfsck.
When Richard Stallman wrote the GNU manifesto, he pointed out that
even though the source code could be freely distributed, there were
lots of ways to make money, and lots of people HAVE made money on GPL
software as well as other Open Source Software.
Richard suggested that support, testing, training, installation,
configuration, and maintenance were the most expensive part of any
software, and that these functions could be isolated from royalties.
Most companies try to roll all of those other charges into their
royalty price, and add a "maintenance fee" that is 20% of the
royalties. In many cases, the maintenance also includes upgrades when
they are released.
Linux is a good example of how companies make money by selling the
other things separately. Doing so also makes it easier to price
appropriately. For example, a desktop user may need very little help
and may be willing to wait for the answer, while a company that uses
Linux in a production server may have "Severity 1" issues where they
need to have someone working to get things working again the minute
they report it, because the losses could be huge.
Ironically, companies like IBM, Oracle, and SAP are often quite
supportive of Linux, partly because when something does go wrong, they
can even trace problems through the operating system if necessary.
> Moshe Goldfarb
> Collector of soaps from around the globe.
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