Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:
> Suppose I wrote "Marin's OS" and it started becoming enormously
> popular. Bill gates comes around and wants to buy it from me and I
> don't want Microsoft to crush it. I say "O.K. You can buy it for
> Thirty Seven Trillion Dollars and you have to kiss my ass on PBS
> during their fund raisers for the next 5 years." You think he'd get
> the message? :-)

Well, they'd have two alternative courses of action.

1) Reimplement the interesting and popular features of Marin's OS into
   Windows 2018.  (Do that in C, and badly, of course).  FUD your OS
   to death while the masses await the "new and improved Windows".
   The best way to do that is to declare Marin's OS "non-standard",
   thus implying that Windows 2018 is, or will be, "standard".  Then
   wait until you sue them for copyright or patent infringement.  By
   the time your complaint arrives before a court, you're out of
   business, and they can pay more lawyers than you can.

2) Sue *you* for patent infringement, over one of their 18,459
   software patents (though probably not the one that covers the "use
   of the colour blue in a screen that warns the user about a fatal
   condition that caused the operating system to become inoperative").
   You'd have no option but to give them your source code, for free,
   _and_ under NDA, so that no-one else will benefit from it.

I sympathise with your argument that the developer ought to have a way
to profit from their own work, but unfortunately, I am more and more
concerned that if your software is not open source, it doesn't stand a
chance against Microsoft.

Besides, there's another trend that I am observing.  The *users* of
software are starting to get the message that the purpose of Open
Source is to protect them, the users - not the programmers.  As a
result, more and more users are demanding access to the source code of
whatever software they use.  I think that, in the long run, the only
business model that will stand a chance in the marketplace will be
ACT's: sell services and support, give away the software.

Perhaps an intermediate position would be "ransom software" whereby
you release your software as closed-source until you've received
enough money for it ("enough" being defined by you within a time frame
also defined by you, but verified by a third party), at which point
you commit to releasing it as Open Source.  I've seen a page
explaining this somewhere on the Web.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.