Open Source Economics

On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 09:43, Phil Mattison wrote:
> I've been trying to understand the economic rationale behind the open source
> philosophy, and I think I see an apparent contradiction. From what I've seen
> so far it seems there are two economic motives for contributing to open
> source projects. (Ignoring those who do it just for fun.)
---
Not wishing to take on your question directly since only the programmers
that contribute to open source - FOSS license stuff can comment about
why they would do that and each person might have different reasons,
but...

I think that if you consider your earlier post about Mandrake 9.2 being
impressive, you apparently aren't considering that this stuff isn't
created in a vacuum. ALL distro's benefit from being able to examine the
code of the other (YAST license notwithstanding) and incorporate some of
the code into their project or distro. That is what the GPL (and many
similar licenses are about). If a distro hasn't vastly improved their
installation routines and packaging setup since the days of Red Hat 7.2
(your last exposure), then they are likely to be gasping for survival.

Likewise, if you want to utilize GPL code in something you are working
on, you have to release the source of all your changes if you sell it.
Yes it allows you to obtain revenue for support but it also allows the
purchaser to give the deliberately obfuscated source to someone else or
make changes themselves. This means that when they figure out that the
people that they bought the program from are scum sucking profiteers,
that they can possibly not completely abandon their investment and get
it modified.

It ain't a perfect model but it seems to be working

Craig