Yeah it’s just propaganda, not really an idea. Software isn’t scarce so applying it directly to economic theory is mistaken but if one really wants to, the best label for Free software is free market capitalism. Proprietary software would be mercantilism. And the closest thing to communism might be semi-free software.

This is wrong. Look at the economies created around gnome, there are several companies who hire gnome contributors to improve and develop gnome technologies. The companies earn money by improving and developing software to meet other peoples requirements. (Nokia for the nx00 series, intel for the moblin laptops etc)

Once some GPL software is released no-one is going to pay you to develop the same thing again, someone might pay you to make improvements. This is likely to be cost effective to them because you have skills and experience in the project already.

Some cases where it is in a companies interest for your work to be open source:

1 It was to improve an existing piece of open source software and they’re going to be distributing it

2. It was to improve an existing piece of open source software and they’re not redistributing it, but they don’t want to have to keep rebasing your patch on new releases

3.It will speed up development of the software

4. Your software is in an area that is not the companies focus and will bring no to little competitive advantage. e.g. a company fixing bugs in a 3rd party software library

Not content with that, I’ve written a very alpha systems administration course and I’m a board member for the Ubuntu Learning project. a project seeking to create the background materials required for teaching around the world.

So I’m already leading by example, already doing more than just procrastination. I hope you can appreciate that I’m not just a disembodied voice in the community.

For the record though, Canonical is funded by Mark who made his money elsewhere. Sun got bought out by Oracle, so that FOSS company wasn’t making any money or else they wouldn’t have been purchased. On a side-note, I’d like to see someone write about how Sun who bought MySQL is now owned by Oracle. Oracle owns MySQL, Java, Seibel, and quite a few other things. Oracle (in my mind) is getting to be a sort of smaller version of Microsoft with it’s pending monopolistic status.

Anyway…back on point….. like I said, we agree. I don’t see money being made in FOSS development. If there was the cash in it, more people would be living off of it, getting paid (even for part-time work), etc. I hope Martin allows this reply of mine as well as another one that is pending, because I think such discussions (important because of the 3 blog posts surrounding this topic) have opened a can ‘o worms.

Maybe this has been discussed before, probably has, but what has been really DONE about it? I would like to suggest that someone form a group to teach others. Come up with a plan, come up with a consistent method and format for training people, come up with the basic, intermediate and advanced levels, come up with real-world examples, solutions, scenarios, and run with it.

Martin, I recall you putting together a bunch of PCs, why not make a non-profit, get a PC lab going, setup a training lab or school if you will, and charge people a NOMINAL fee to attend there. Right now it is so cost prohibitive to attend school, jobs are scarce in the USA, etc.

Instead of FOLLOWING the old trend of arguing over this stuff and never getting anywhere, let’s START a trend and LEAD by EXAMPLE.

You have my email address. I’m in. Who else is with me?

I look forward to your response.

I’m going to wager that more money is generated by companies that support Windows because there is only 1 company that makes Windows, but thousands of companies that support it. Microsoft has a stranglehold on the source code and programmers had to beg and plead to get the API access they did. there are some parts of Windows that will NEVER EVER see the light of day outside of Redmond.

In the F/OSS World, we have thousands of people writing for Linux AND also supporting it; so if all things were equal in that regard between Windows and Linux (assuming both were F/OSS), I’d imagine that both would have an equal time trying to make money off of what is freely given away.

As I said before, I think the key is education, and I see Martin (and others) really leading the way on that. Something like 1% of all PCs run Linux, and of that 1%, 30% run Ubuntu as their choice of client/desktop OS.

There’s ways to make money in F/OSS, but software development isn’t it. Even support of it is *kind of* a way to make money, but it’s still tough…possible, yes, but tough. I think it has to be more along the lines of training, education, maybe even slowly migrating people and companies over to Linux, etc.

That isn’t true for (say) airplanes. The cost of engineering/design must be spread over the # of units. If #units is very large then you’d be correct, but that isn’t true for all markets. Example: medical software.