Re: business models [was patent stuff]

[Karim Yaghmour <karim@opersys.com>]

I agree that this should go on some other list, but 'til then, here are my 2c.

No offense Larry, but many of your arguments are the same used by Microsoft
to push their vision of publicly available source.

Larry McVoy wrote:
> It's economics 101 - a free market will go to whomever can provide the
> needed service most cheaply.

I will take the liberty of rephrasing to illustrate my point of view:
"a free market will go to whomever can provide the needed service."

The question is: Can you provide the service? Of course if the service
you are selling is common knowledge, then you've got nothing to sell
your competitor can't. But if you're part of building the technology
then you're certainly in a know-how monopoly position. This is why I
don't think any of the kernel developers will ever be out of a job.

The drawback to this is that you simply can't scale a knowledge-based
company the way you do with a classical intellectual-property-based
company. The way I see it, the software industry will look increasingly
like that of other speciality fields such as law and medicine. Sure, any
doctor can administer a serum, but not every doctor can actually perform
robotic heart-surgery. He who can perform robotic heart-surgery can
offer something other doctors can't. Same will be with the software field.

> In my opinion, it's time for the free software fanatics to ease off and
> let some moderates come in and try and define a reasonable compromise.

Can you suggest a list of names of some "moderates"?

> If you hold the "It's GPL or bugger off" position, people will figure out
> how to work around it and it is virtually certain you won't like what they
> do.  If you offer them some sort of reasonable compromise, I'll bet they
> take it.  If you don't, you get to live with whatever their nasty evil
> business minds dream up.

I predict the inverse. Of course, people will actually try to use patents to
restrict free and open source software. And of course, they will push this
as hard and as far as they can. The community, however, will always find
alternative ways to obtain the same results and, in the end, no client wil
use the patent holder's products or services. Instead, they will use the
community's alternative solutions.

You would like the open source and free software communities to get used
to having their rights being violated. I think the software "manufacturers"
better get used to the fact that they can't outsmart the community,
regardless of the legal/political/financial tools they use.

As I said earlier, the current software business model is an endangered
species.

Best regards,

Karim

===================================================
                 Karim Yaghmour
               karim@opersys.com
      Embedded and Real-Time Linux Expert
===================================================