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Re: Redhat Investor-relations run by Microsoft?
Greetings Mr. Kostantantinov,
I believe one one must make the distinction between this so called
"Open source business model" and "Free Software" as set by Richard Stallman.
Each company which produces Open Software and intends to gain revenue from it
has its own "Open Source Business Model". The conservative model is to
bundle additional services along with software products. Richard Stallman
however advocates "Free Software" by the community, for the community. He is
rather ambivalent regarding "Open Source in business environments". Luckily,
Linux and other OSS projects do not rely on a company to fund them.
Such projects largely remain the whim of volunteering developers, so even
if OSS based companies do eventually stutter and die, Free Software initiatives
will continue to grow. As long as at least a single body maintains a truly
royalty free Linux distribution, companies will continue to use Linux.
Debian is a good example, for it is not business oriented at all, as opposed
to all other Linux distributions.
So far, the "Open Source Business Model" has not proven itself.
Even companies like Valinux, which has a great potential of harvesting
revenue, have not been able to make significant advancements.
One will often hear from Linux hostile folks the following:
"wh0a d00d! linucks is sux0rz, all companies thet trayed 2 make bux0rz from
leanoocks got 0wned by da eye are ess."
The above account is slightly exaggerated, purely for reasons of humoristic
prolification. What these Linux hostile individuals do not understand, that
it's not OSS that had failed, it is the "Open Source Business Model."
Open Source continues to generate reliable and moral software.
My personal inclination is not to advocate the "Open Source business model"
but simply to endorse Free Software for the community, sans the added
financial bias.
BTW, I don't see any reason which prevents the community from creating
good groupware software. groupware is a fairly new concept, and even
commercial implementations leave much to be desired.
Evolution is advancing nicely, and the phpgroupware folks are in the process
of establishing a groupware 'standard'. I believe that the final results
will prove to be much more satisfactory than inconsistent, proprietary and
non-free alternatives.
Best regards, Mr. Rubin
On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 05:08:03PM +0300, Ilya Konstantinov wrote:
> Hi Nadav,
>
> A friend of mine, a developer on Apache/PHP on Win2K, has numerously
> claimed that the open source model won't work. It's not out of bad
> intentions -- I'm sure he'd like to see it working out -
> but simple logics tell him it can't work.
>
> And then, there are the facts. 60% HTTP servers run by Apache, Linux
> powering loads of mail and FTP servers around, major sites run on Linux
> / FreeBSD, not to mention cheap firewalls and NATs. At that friend's
> workplace, they've ended up swapping the Win2K server with a Linux one.
> (and besides, there are no losing and winning those projects -- all is
> important is to "stay afloat" and have fun)
>
> One concern though, is whether the community could pull complicated
> applications -- not an MTA / HTTP server, but things like groupware
> servers. Some guys think that's exactly where Linux gonna fail in favor
> of commercial vendors. We'll see about that ...
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Ilya Konstantinov
>
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