Re: OSS and getting money for it (was: [tlug] Re: Why Vista Sucks)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Oh.. ok. Haven't seen that point.
 > So, to make OSS comercialy success full one has to make the
 > giving away part an economic advantage... which might be very
 > hard.

No, OSS can be commercially successful.  The problem is that OSS
development (as we normally think of it) cannot be commercially
successful.  What do I mean by "as we think of it"?  Well, take your
kernel developers example.  In some cases, such as the IBM Classes for
Unicode, there is a true donation that 3rd parties benefit from.  But
in many other cases, although the feature is not objectionable, only
the developer really knows how to use it.  A sort of economic analog
to The Purloined Letter (a Poe short story in which the crucial
document was in plain sight the whole time).  But what we normally
think of the benefits of OSS come when either the use of the feature
is obvious, or it is well-documented.

In other words, profitable OSS development almost always comes with
"IP by other means" such as trade secrets, lack of documentation of
what the feature is "really for", or general uselessness except to one
customer.  Eg, Motorola's PPC business does not benefit from a GCC
peephole optimization that uses an Intel-specific instruction.  If you
can catch an ex-Cygnus GCC developer, they will tell you that getting
chip vendors to fund work on code generation for their own chips was
easy, but that the art of being Cygnus was getting them to pay for
generic optimizations and feature implementation.

 > This isn't the same problem IMHO. That malaria doesn't get
 > as much attention from the pharma industry can quite simply
 > get explained by looking at what would return more money
 > when hitting the market: millions of poor people who have
 > barely enough to eat or a few thousand filthy rich people
 > who did a mistake once upon a time and want to cover up for it.

Precisely, and that's what makes it the same problem.  It doesn't
matter whether the people don't have the money or if you can't collect
it from them.  The needs are there and they don't get served because
the market provides no way to turn "customer need" into "vendor
profit".