On May 3, 8:00 am, 7 <website_has_em...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > Ubuntu Hardy Heron: Beyond the Hype and into the Dilemma
>
> > ,----[ Quote ]
> > | The main place where innovation is happening rapidly seems to be in
> > | Ubuntu's efforts to balance the concept of free software with the drive
> > | toward commercialism by Canonical, Ubuntu's face in business.
>
> I doubt there is any truth behind that statement.
This is hardly revolutionary. It's the classic OSS revenue model
first proposed by Richard Stallman 24 years ago, when he first wrote
the GNU manifesto. He proposed that the software licenses should be
free, but the SUPPORT, including packaging, anthologies, quality
assurance, and bug fixes, as well as data services, could be revenue
opportunities.
This revenue model has turned out to be very successful, for companies
like IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell, and Sun, as well as service companies
like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.
In fact, OSS projects seem to have much better longevity than most
proprietary companies. People like to point to Microsoft as an
example of success, but look at the others. Borland, WordPerfect,
Lotus, Corel, DBase, and hundreds of others, may of whom were market
leaders for a few years, ended up becoming bit-players and ultimately
becoming subsidiaries of companies who were more balanced and were
subsidized with OSS related support and consulting revenue.
> With free software comes business demand for prouducts
> and services. The nature of that demand is highly fluctuating.
> Ubuntu could be highly successful just by servicing demand
> and scaling back when demand wanes instead of over committing
> through business expansion and then trying to milk the market.
> Thats not a 'normal' business model of Commercialism.
> That may be what a Novel kind of failed business model leads to.
Right now, one of the big problems for Ubuntu is it's lack of support
for LSB 3.0 standards, as well as it's lack of support for RPM
packages. Many commercial applications for Linux are distributed via
RPM, and cannot easily be installed on Ubuntu systems.
Canonical is trying to build that same kind of support for Ubuntu and
Debian packages that Red Hat and SUSE/Novell (and many otthers) have
generated for LSB 3 standards.
Ubuntu is a nice product, but they need to support the core framework
of standards adopted by the business community that has adopted Linux.
It's quite likely that we will see a similar tactic for Ubuntu that we
have seen with Red Hat and SUSE Linux, with one version being the fast
and free system, and the other being a more stable and supported
system, complete bit binary-only packages and tools as well as the GPL
tools.
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