Fortune magazine article needs more info to be informative.

[Eric Dunbar]

On 6/18/05, David Allouche <david at allouche.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 14:20 -0500, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
> > The blame for this article should be placed squarely on Fortune magazine.
> > This article raises more questions than it answers, and none of those
> > questions make Fortune look like they know what they're talking about.

The two articles I read this morning do suggest that their writers
aren't exactly that well informed about FLOSS, but, what these
articles *do* signal is that they're sitting up and taking notice.

> In the light of another article in the same dept.
>
> http://www.forbes.com/technology/infrastructure/2005/06/15/jboss-ibm-linux_cz_dl_0615jboss.html
>
> it appears that Verisign is "sponsoring" Forbes (and probably Daniel
> Lyons, editor of both articles) in an aggressive FUD campain against
> free software and Linux.

I don't think it's a FUD campaign -- it's free advertising for FLOSS
projects! If FLOSS can be good enough to eat away at the profits of
companies, then it has to be good enough to use!

This jboss Forbe's article does, however, raise some very good
questions. WHO should adopt the FLOSS development model. If you have
an idea that's unique enough to stand on its own and people will be
willing to shell out cash for, then, by all means go closed source.
You can make far more money selling something than giving it away
(unless you happen on a different money making model).

However, if you're going to make your money off support then you have
fewer reasons to keep a closed source model and you may even grow your
business by going FLOSS. But, you really do need to ask yourself the
question of whether or not it's worth it.

In the end the market place of ideas will determine how successful
FLOSS will be, both at producing quality USABLE code, and as a
foundation for successful businesses or non-profits.

Plus, FLOSS is not the be all and end all in software. Closed source
developers like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe make stunning software
which will never come out of a FLOSS development model.

FLOSS does simple things well. It does a good job of making the nuts
and bolts, 2-by-4s (silly Canadian imperial measure of wood... 2
inches by 4 feet (5.08 cm x 121.92 cm)) and that sort of building
block. For e.g. it does a good job of making the OS, server services,
text editors and web browsers. These are all your basic building
blocks of an OS. *Everyone* needs those things and they need them to
"just work" (servers seem like the odd man out but they too are the
building blocks of networks). FLOSS doesn't do quite as well in the
realm of multimedia, photo editing (e.g. GIMP), spread sheets and that
kind of software. These are "niche" softwares and very complex ones at
that. It takes a lot longer to copy them and get them right (as you
can tell by using them... Excel and Word are light years ahead of
OO.org but GEdit is better than compable in-built apps in Mac OS X and
Windows XP).

Anyway, time to eat breakfast.

Eric.