Lies, lies, lies II

Ben Carlson beaker457 at hotmail.com
Fri Sep 21 14:16:41 CDT 2001


Warning:  Open-Source Religious Argument.

>If we could make it work, we'd have to call in the lawyers, and then ... we 
>probably couldn't make it work.

Quote from the Simpsons:  "Send in our deadliest weapon, the Lawyers".

>  Can anyone think of a "open source" software company that has >generated 
>real profits using the shrink-wrap model? (Offhand?)

A free software company that makes money charging for their software, that 
does not make sense.  What the company can charge for is the services that 
come with the software such as Red Hat.  If they had stopped making 
aquistions they would have shown a healthy profit already.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine there are plenty of people 
making a living off of Linux.  Plenty of programmers, distribution, Admins 
that make a very comfortable living.  In fact I believe Red Hat stock has 
done pretty well in the past and what do they really produce?

As a programmer I would not be comfortable with creating a format and 
software to read the format, then charging money for both the data and 
format.  Because we specialize in technology does that mean we should be 
milking people for profits because we can make a format for reading data?

Ben Carlson






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