Belinda is concerned

[Paul DiRezze]

At 09:38 PM 16/03/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>It provides faster, more easliy customizable business platforms, and all 
>for free.

I don't think the above statement is correct.  I think it should read "It 
provides faster, more easily customizable business platforms, and all for a 
much lower cost".  It isn't free (as in beer) and it'll never be free. It's 
free as in speech or free as in choice. Happily for users, pricing in the 
software industry is trending from what the vendor would like to charge to 
what the buyer would like to pay.

>Capitalist societies are profit driven and it has long been held that 
>profits drive technological innovation. Yet Opensource threatens to 
>destabilize the profit driven business model of software companies as 
>Linux becomes more pervasive in business applications. I dont think that 
>profit driven companies are just going to lay down and die, and I also do 
>not think that Opensource will be able to remain in its current state.

As I see it, capitalism is alive and well and the software industry is 
really maturing.  The only difference now is that one huge barrier to entry 
(intellectual property protection) has been effectively nullified.  Because 
licensing usually accounts for over fifty percent of a software company's 
revenue,  businesses better learn how to develop software for about 1/3 to 
1/5 of what they're spending now.  Same goes for marketing and 
operations.  Another goal has to be increasing profit from services 
(support, administration, training, customization).  I think the Internet 
has a huge part to play in this.

>It has been widely proposed that some sort of hybrid between opensource 
>and proprietary software will emerge in the coming years, in what form, I 
>do not know. A potentially comparable arrangement would be the 
>pharmaceutical industry whereby companies develop medical drugs to profit, 
>yet also help the great good of mankind (1).

I wouldn't bet on it.
Increasingly, users have no qualms using GPL software.
Increasingly, software developers have no qualms developing GPL software.
Increasingly, hardware vendors have no qualms selling OS-less hardware and 
bundling GPL software.

>The biggest anti-GPLers are clearly against the clause in the license that 
>states that any code added to a GPLed product must distributed under the 
>GPL as well. From a capitalist perspective this would be considered theft 
>of intellectual property, from a science perspective this seen as 
>promoting the greater good (1). It is not clear who will win the debate.

As long as groups of users directly employ programmers, there will always 
be a place for the GPL because the GPL is a no-brainer for infrastructure 
software. Just as it makes economic sense for a population to cooperatively 
build physical infrastructure (roads, sewers), it makes equal sense to 
share the cost and ensure open access to software infrastructure.  As I 
read it, that's the GPL's effect.  As for non-infrastructure software, I 
don't really know.

>Capitalism exists to create wealth, but wealth does not necessarily come 
>in a monetary form. Wealth can come from one man learning something from 
>another, as with Linux (2). Profit driven corporations however would like 
>to argue this point and claim that wealth as it relates to capitalism is 
>monetary, and that with an ever growing number of corporations turning to 
>Linux and the GPL, profit driven software companies are left in the dust. 
>It will be interesting to see the outcome of the debate in a few years time.

 From what I can figure, free software will lead to increased efficiency 
and significant wealth creation (monetary and otherwise) in almost every 
industry except the proprietary software industry; because for users, this 
technology really reduces the cost of reliably storing, manipulating  and 
communicating corporate information.

paul

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml