[ubuntu-uk] Free vs non-free drivers etc

[Tony Arnold]

Alan,

On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:20:53 +0000, alan c wrote:

> Tony Arnold wrote:

>> Are you confusing free as in beer with free as in freedom? FOSS does
>> not have to be free as in beer!
> 
> No I am not, for myself anyway. I purchased a retail box of suse 9.1 for
> example a while ago.
> 
> And there is the oracle move against Red Hat, not to mention novell
> apparently going a step too far with its MS patents deal. (I am winding
> down my use of suse already).
> 
> If you can see a clear business model that would provide say, a small
> software business, success, if it only used open source (say GPL) I
> would be interested to know the thoughts.

I'm no business person, but I've always assumed money could be made
through offering services around open source products. But may the
economics just don't work. Maybe it requires a company of a certain size
for it to work. How does Canonical make its money?

Regards,
Tony.