Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [OT] Re: Troll Tech [was Re: Sco vs. IBM] | From | David Woodhouse <> | Date | Mon, 23 Jun 2003 17:13:36 +0100 |
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On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 16:39, Larry McVoy wrote: > That's probably a good enough test case. Explain to me how your support > contracts are ever going to provide enough money to redo GCC or build > something equally substantial.
> I'm not saying that you can't make a living doing support, you obviously > can. I'm saying that it doesn't produce enough income to do what needs > to be done.
Now we actually isolate a point on which perhaps we disagree.
If there are things which _need_ to be done, but which no individual customer is willing to pay for in Free Software, one of the following things will happen:
1. They'll revert to proprietary software. 2. They'll club together with other users of the software and fund it. 3. The contractors (us) will 'tax' them enough on the stuff they _are_ willing to pay for to do it in the background.
I see plenty of evidence that #2 and #3 are actually happening in real life. I've also seen a lot of #1 of course, but I suspect its frequency will be decreasing over the coming years.
I certainly wouldn't assert that #1 will die out altogether, but neither will the non-existence of #2 and #3 cause the Free Software bubble to burst.
> If it did then CVS would be BK, for example.
That's possibly a better example than your previous one of GCC, but without disrespect to your achievements I still suspect it would have happened, and indeed will happen, eventually.
-- dwmw2
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