[Gllug] dot com failure.

[Richard Hillesley]

On Friday 01 March 2002 12:27 am, you wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Gordon Joly wrote:
> > > It's not impossible to make money from GPL software, but it *is* very
> > > difficult, and virtually unheard of on a large scale.
> >
> > Heard of CYGNUS?
>
> Yes.
>
> They made money on a small scale from GPLed and LGPLed
> software.  They couldn't decide how to proceed from there
> and were bought out by Red Hat, who are bigger, but still
> only making money on a small scale.
>

there is another side to this equation - a lot of companies are making a lot 
of money out of Linux and free software -

the hardware companies like IBM, SGI, Intel, Sun, Nokia, HP ad infinitum who 
can run vastly reduced R&D budgets on operating systems and get much more for 
their buck - while employing vast numbers of programmers on other aspects of 
the software - releasing the software as GPL is actually of benefit to them 
because it encourages other to do the same, further reducing R&D budgets

the companies that use free software, like for instance Amazon, whose move to 
profit was almost entirely due to their move to free software - vast budgets
are released for building applications on top of free software which means 
more people are employed in productive work -

it works both ways - free software releases budgets for more adventurous 
programming, so SGI reducing their investment in OS development, IRIX, 
releases budgets for for graphics, video editing etc. and so on -

and software development budgets are released within companies themselves
so that software can be written -

quite apart from the fact that free software makes research work much easier
in academic and research establishments, meaning innovation - sorry, I forgot,
all innovation comes from redmond,

and so it goes ...

There is a clear argument for saying that free software will release budgets
from paying for crap, and will result in greater development and innovation 
... the opposite of what you are arguing ...



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