Going about beta-testing a program... advice?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 01:04:19AM -0400, cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Linux, the putative topic of this mailing list, would NEVER have become
> even as much as a curiosity had it been licensed under similar
> provisions to MySQL.
> 
> The "comparable" thing would have been for Linus Torvalds to have
> announced:
> 
>  "Hey, everyone!  I have implemented a new OS kernel for the 80386
>   architecture.  You can try it out; if you use it for anything at all
>   commercial, you'll have to pay me $450 per CPU."
> 
> If all the people building 'open source' software went by the same sort
> of standard, well, "hobbyists" could use a Linux distribution for free,
> but anyone using it for a web server at work would wind up having to
> send in license fees to each of:
> 
>  - Linus Torvalds (for Linux)
>  - Ulrich Drepper (for GLIBC)
>  - The Apache Foundation (obvious?)
>  - OpenBSD folk (for OpenSSH)
>  - Larry Wall (for Perl)
>  - and a further cast of hundreds...
> 
> And you'd easily be expected to pay between different levels, thousands
> of dollars per host.
> 
> Linux would obviously NOT have taken off; no corporation would allow
> this kind of liability inside their door, and we'd all be using some
> flavour of BSD, where they _don't_ play this kind of licensing fee game.
> 
> The economic "win" that comes out of free software comes from the
> sharing of benefit of USAGE.  
> 
> It's clear that it is worth developing software and *giving it away*
> because everyone gets the benefit of not having to pay licensing fees
> for all the software that they _didn't_ have to pay for.
> 
> The "dual licensing" game is essentially a bait-and-switch ploy that
> allows organizations that are producing proprietary, privately-held and
> privately-developed software to feign involvement in the free software
> community.
> 
> They get free advertising out of the exercise, and, if they're lucky, an
> external set of advocates marketing their products for them.

I think the companies that best work with open source software,
especially the free (in both ways) open source stuff, tend to be those
that make money selling a service, such as web storage of images, some
entertainment, processing information for others, etc.

Comapnies that have the main purpose of developing and selling software
are just not going to like it anywhere near as much.  On the other hand
if you sell the service of customzing and configuring the software to
the end users specifications for them, then open source could work just
fine, as long as you can sell enough customization service to stay in
business, and there isn't someone else doing a better job customizing
your open source software for less.

IBM seems to have always been in the business of selling a solution to
people for some cost.  How it was done didn't matter, and the amount of
tweaking and configuration involved in getting the system to do the
right thing was what mattered.  It doesn't matter to IBM that much if
they use their own OS/2, MVS, or OS/400 or Linux to get the job done.
By using Linux they get lots more qualified people to help out with many
of the design problems of an OS, while paying some of their own
employees to implemnt some stuff that isn't as likely to be done by
hobyists (such as SAN, LVM, AFS, etc).  By doing the main work on some
of the small but tricky (mainly due to expensive hardware requried for
testing), and then giving that away to others to use and improve on,
they make their portfolia of available solutions to customer problems
that much bigger, and they may be able to solve a customers problem with
less work that it would have taken to do it all tehmselves, which then
means they can either do it for less than a competitor, or they can make
a bigger margin on the job or perhaps both.  It probably also makes IBM
more popular with the small guys in some ways.

Lennart Sorensen
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