Re: Making money on open source, if not by selling _support_, then how?

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 21:37 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> > (a) work needs to be done,
> > (b) there exist paying customers.
> > 
> > Why should, for any i, P(i) be fighting to get all of (a), hence
> > all of (b)? If you ponder this a bit, from several points of view,
> > you'll see it's nonsense.
> 
> The problem with the above is that neither of the components of this nice
> formula is directly measurable,

Need is measurable: Someone seeing a carpenter saying, "I need
a cupboard" is certainly measurable. Paying customers are
measurable, too, count them, and sum the paid bills.

>  or stable.

Who said business could be stable? That would be beyond silly.
And not just because a start-up can, by starting _up_, not
be stable.
Thing is, we can observe how people of one group make
others' lives more difficult than do people in some other group,
by trying to cheat, playing tricks, etc.. Things that would
cause major reprimands in a family situation, and things that
otherwise would make prosecutors have a look.

The software market is screwed up in many ways. Far from being
ideological, I think it is fair, for example, to assume that companies
developing MS digital video software of any kind will have to pay next
to nothing to Microsoft ... now. They may even get subsidies from MS.
Now we are taught to consider the following clever:

- fall for the MS offer now, if you think can get into some
  market.
- MS making this offer, effectively pushing the competition into
  oblivion.

Is this a rational setting? Will we win or loose, on he whole?
Answer: The company that comes out rich has always been: Microsoft.
Conclusion?

Any long term rational actor in an economy would have to say, not
clever in the first case. But most will fall for it,
see Mancur Olson's analysis, for example.


>  Otherwise, planned economy would
> be possible, and also, be much more attractive than yours, because of its
> physical rather spiritual way of acting.

If someone starts some method of financially rewarding software
production, and it works, and you say, huh, this is XYZism, than
your priestly remark adds the ideology, not the working business
model.

There is no relation of software ERP to some vastly undefined fantasy
that is commonly called planned economy. There is no
unplanned, spontaneous economy either: economy depends on
what the participants do. They make plans (which can fail),
and they act spontaneously. The question is, how, and guided
by what? No need to look at this starting from alleged ideals,
or ideologies. A mojor GPL software business has surprised us
with having some $350 Mio to buy JBoss. Planned or not?


> That is exactly a communist way of perception.

Not mine, though.

>  No offense meant. You want
> to change people to make them fit to your ideals. It is inhumane, at least.
> (:-))

I certainly do not want to change people, let me just remind you
that people choose. And certainly I can change the amount of
information that is available.

Ask people about the features and misfeatures of Ada.
What is a good way to change the perception of Ada?