Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Bootstrap and Licensing
Eric,
See my comments below.
Mike (01)
> * Foks who do for-profit fundiing won't be
> interested in
> funding the software that prospective competition
> can
> use to get into the business.
That is a general problem. (02)
>
> * The outfit that uses the OHS, therefore, will
> depend for
> competetive advantage on the amount of data they
> have
> amassed, and the "snowball effect" derived from
> having
> a lot of users on board before any competition
> shows up.
By the value of thier content, and the services they
provide.
It is a company that uses it internally? Or a project
that uses it for documentation. (03)
Look at the www.doxygen.org, free software, used by
many, everyone contributes bit and bobs. (04)
>
> * That outfit's expenses will therefore need to be
> heavily
> devoted to amassing data, attracting users, and
> providing whatever services or facilities it
> needs to
> provide to keep them interested.
take a look a slashdot.net or perlmonks.org
great sites that have many users, each with a niche of
thier own. Both not possible without a certain bit of
software.
Bye the way, the perlmonks everything engine might be
very interesting to you all.Also the slash engine is
also Gpled. (05)
>
> Mp3.com may be good example of a funded, profitable
> company that uses open software. But I wonder:
> * How much time and effort they spend on improving
> the open source.
How much time and effort does anyone spend on finding
and fixing bugs in any software. I have spent the
last 5 years in a RougeWave/Sybase/Microsoft client
server world, and I have had less bugs and problems
with free-software, better response times and spent
less time tracking bugs. (06)
MP3.com was just an idea that jumped in my head.
Here is an interesting article on the internet music
market.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,48517,00.html (07)
> * How profitable they are.
Here is an older statement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-251294.html?legacy=cnet (08)
> * How much funding they were able to attract.
I dont know exactly, the business realy depends on the
model at hand. (09)
>
> (I ask these questions in all ignorance. The answers
> will
> help to determine how realistic a model this may be.
> However, even with the *best* answers, I think they
> would have found it impossible to attract any
> funding
> whatever, had their goal been to develop linux or
> apache
> in order to establish their business.)
Fine, and that is why apache and linux is a volunteer
effort, look at codesourcery.com and
redhat.com/cygnus.com they are the leading
contributors to the gcc compiler.
Apache has a foundation to organise efforts. (010)
>
> As we have observed in the past, open source tends
> to
> do well when it consists of incremental
> modifications to
> an existing system, but not for developing new
> systems.
New systems are created out of need or experiment,
and I disaggree, many new smaller projects are
implemented. If you can piecemeal the project you will
find people willing to contribute modules. (011)
>
> I expect that is entirely do, once again, to the
> chicken and
> egg problem: We don't have the online collaboration
> tools
> we need to collaborate remotely on the design of an
> online remote collaboration system!
Wait, we do have them nowadays.
We have tools like
perlmonks,slashdot,savannah/sourceforge, blogger, we
have protocols like cvs,irc,http. We have all types of
collaboration tools. (012)
> Existing messaging systems support high level
> thinking and
> strategizing like this, but they quickly bog down
> when we
> attempt to sort out the details.
You need a way to index, search, xref and reorg the
data quickly. It is difficult. (013)
mike (014)
=====
James Michael DuPont (015)
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