Linux in business

On Jan 22, 2004, at 7:27 AM, Phil Mattison wrote:

>>
>>> for fun, it will not. That darn GPL sort of gets in the way of making
> mon=
>> ey
>>> though, doesn't it?
>>
>> No, it doesn't. It gets in the way of vendor lock in, which many
>> companies
>> use in order to make money. Imagine having to sign an annual contract
>> to
>> only use one chain when eating at a fast food joint... :)
>>
> Maybe you're right. I guess it depends on what you consider a viable
> business model. It seems the FSF will be to the software business what
> P2P
> file sharing is to the music industry. If the RIAA can't put a stop to
> MP3
> file sharing (and I don't think they can), the only way for musicians
> to
> make money will be live performances. Not necessarily a bad thing, but
> they
> won't be able to get as rich as they would otherwise. In the software
> industry this means no more royalties from 50M copies of VisiCalc, for
> example. Programmers get paid for writing custom software, service and
> support. Maybe that's enough. You could argue that without the
> pecuniary
> motive the really good software won't get written or supported, but the
> existence of Linux seems to prove otherwise. On the other hand, Linux
> still
> doesn't have quite the polish of Windows. But then, that might be
> nothing
> more than the difference between Whole-Wheat and White.

If the surveys are correct that show that only 20% of the code is
written for the shrink wrap market any more, and that the overwhelming
majority of that is games, this could have a lot more to do with the
maturing of the software market than with licensing issues. How many
spreadsheets and word processors do you need? The closest things to
killer apps that we have seen in the shrink-wrap market in years are
thing like GarageBand, consumerized versions of professional programs.
It doesn't take many programs to remove features and simplify the
interface.