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

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:18:35 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>>> Need is measurable: Someone seeing a carpenter saying, "I need
>>> a cupboard" is certainly measurable.
>> 
>> It is not the data one needs to open a furniture store.
> 
> I think that all of todays furniture stores are mostly in
> the hands of heirs. So lets not discuss furniture, but software.
> I said that, on the whole, there is no point in Producer(i)
> trying to hog all potential orders in a market, if you ponder
> this a bit.
> 
> In fact, many western economies do have rules that should avoid
> the effect of P(i).gets(every order) for just one i. It's just
> that Microsoft manages to circumvent the application of the
> rules.

The point stands. You cannot measure it. MS is able to circumvent whatever
the rules exactly for this reason. If that were measurable, there would be
no need to enforce them in courts. You need no court to decide whether the
bulb will light up. It is 230V. Turn the switch on and it does.

[ Instead of idiotic requirements to separate MediaPlayer from Windows, the
government should pass laws enforcing liability of commercial software
vendors. ]

>> Economy does not
>> function this way. 
> 
> Well who said economy functions this or that way?

Nobody. I said it does *not*! (:-))

> (I've made a
> claim that many people in the software market behave in certain
> ways, and that this has certain effects. No "economy" in sight.)
> In fact, no one knows anything about how economy works, really.
> Although certainly personal acquaintance with those who can
> open doors is a crucial factor in most kinds of business.

You have stated some imperative rules. My point was that these rules
obviously are not ones by which economical agents act. So you have to
translate these rules into ones of the market economy and try to define a
framework which would be in favor of them. In the end it means adjusting
the economical system. The scale of adjustment needed is up to you. An
alternative is to have agents which do not obey market, but take
*ideological* decisions. These could be the government, GNU movement,
Church, Politburo etc. 

>>> Paying customers are
>>> measurable, too, count them, and sum the paid bills.
>> 
>> You have to get paying customers first.
> 
> Do I?

Sure, how could you measure non-existent customers?

>>> Ask people about the features and misfeatures of Ada.
>>> What is a good way to change the perception of Ada?
> 
>> There is no good way, because Ada is a committee language (which is
>> *good*), a relic of the epoch, when quality was an issue.
> 
> It is certainly an advantage if you have something to say about
> Ada to potential customers who ask you about Ada.
> For example,
> "we have had to write some concurrent code doing such and such.
> It turned out Ada's concurrency features worked nicely.
> The implementation is correct, efficient, and we had it finished
> almost in time."
> 
> Can you say that about Ada?

No. It does not come to this. At least in talks with the customers I
contacted with. They don't use words like "concurrency."

If you rather meant software developers, then they firstly do not take
decisions about the language to be used, and, secondly, they on the whole
are very reluctant when it comes to language or paradigm switch. It was
different 20 years ago, when people tried to know and try everything about
computers. Today, it is physically impossible. Then there are too many
programmers to keep education standard high. So the culture of programmers
has adapted to the new situation.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de