[Dclug] The Economist says recession is a boon for FOSS

[ethan at 757.org]

> No, geeks win in several ways. But few people get paid to write software. 
> They get paid to deploy and service it. And the rest of the geeks get better 
> (or at least more fun) software to work with.

I understand the point of view, but it's kind of puzzling. Right now, lots 
of people get paid to write software. If there is an expectation (for the 
corporations) that people should write it for them for free, then that 
hurts the software authors.

I mean, we've got a local that made $3 billion+ off of Redhat. But the 
geeks that made it could be starving for all I know.

> With the large cooperative community, the software essentially write itself, 
> because many people do it as a hobby on their own time, or even in some cases 
> on their employer's time.

Yea, but by the same token I'd argue that only a subset of the open source 
stuff is highly successful and maintained over time. Lots of it falls when 
the interest from the author(s) falls.

> But altho the initial attraction for companies is the fact that it is free, 
> they later come to appreciate that it can be modified in-house if needed.

Perhaps some people. I'm still not convinced that software being free to 
corporations is a good thing. I don't really care if they have to pay for 
the software.

On the home side, many people don't pay for software at all, be it 
commercial or free. So really open source or closed source doesn't really 
matter. How many people using open source software has actually modified 
the code, do you think?


--
Ethan O'Toole
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