Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) To : comp.programming From : Randy Howard Date : Wed Aug 24 2005 01:48 am Vesa Karvonen wrote (in article ): > Randy Howard wrote: > [...] >> In the meantime, you'll be using commercial software. Even the >> 'best of breed' open source apps have a lot of bizarre little >> problems. Yes, commercial apps have problems too, but you don't >> have to spend three days tracking through release notes, CVS, >> wikis and what not figuring out what a 'valid bug report' looks >> like, you can just pick up the phone and ask for help. > [...] >> (I spend a lot of time doing tech support for friends and >> relatives. *sigh*) > > Have you considered building a business to provide tech support for > selected open source/free software? Not really, at this point I don't need more work to do. > I find it a bit silly to complain about lack of documentation for > something that is free. That's interesting, but I did not complain about lack of documentation. > Stop wasting your life complaining and do > something to improve the situation. Write the documentation that you > wanted yesterday and sell it. I didn't want documentation yesterday. The point is that free software is fine for programmers at this point, but it may be a long time before J. Random Consumer can feel as comfortable with it in general as commercial software. If 1000 people all start businesses (and succeed) for the purpose of supporting the top 1000 open source projects, it /might/ get to that point someday. Open source is currently taking aware market share from geeks and power users. It is not making any reasonable dent in the general population. The main place of traction is in the corporate back end space, where there are enough geeks to maintain open source project code if needed, and there is a viable business model for high end support and services for large apps aimed at business computing work. MySQL is a good example of this. It is much more difficult to convince yourself that a business on supporting smaller apps aimed at the general user will be profitable. I suspect that the large "enterprise apps" implemented as open source will evolve support structures either by the development community itself, or by third party outfits filling a hole left by same. That said, before we see the desktop being taken over by open source products, there has to be some likelihood that people can make a living supporting them, when the average consumer wants /everything/ for free nowadays. Bittorrent being a defacto argument in favor of the claim. -- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) .