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

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

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:56:19 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> 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.

It is not the data one needs to open a furniture store. Economy does not
function this way. 

> Paying customers are
> measurable, too, count them, and sum the paid bills.

You have to get paying customers first. Note that Randy's point about
perfect software nicely fits to your example. A quality cupboard is bought
once per human life. I don't want to be an IKEA's "paying customer."  I
don't want them shipping me logs instead of furniture.

>>  or stable.
> 
> Who said business could be stable?

Not business, but the parameters you need to control production. Market
economy solves the problem uncertainty by moderate wasting the resources.
It follows all adjacent paths. It is a sort of breadth-first search. This
is not a universal solution though, especially when resources are limited.
We can observe that in the software developing sector, market produces
immense wasting without quality.

>> 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.

I just don't believe in any model based on ideological or religious
imperative.

> 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.

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