Dreamweaver Equiv

[Florian Diesch]

Odd <iodine at runbox.no> wrote:

> Florian Diesch wrote:
>> Odd <iodine at runbox.no> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Linux, most apps are free and people maybe expect things
>>> to be free, but what may be needed is to encourage commercial
>>> enterprices to create or port software to Linux. But with the low
>>> market share Linux has in the desktop market, it certainly isn't
>>> easy. Hopefully this will increase, and if people are willing to pay,
>>> perhaps it will happen.
>> 
>> One problem is that porting an application needs a lot of work and is
>> often done badly (e.g. applications don't integrate very well with
>> Linux or aren't portable among distributions).
>
> True.
>
>> Another problem is that a lot of Linux users don't want to use closed
>> source software for various reasons. and a lot of commercial
>> enterprices don't want to create FLOSS for various reasons.
>
> I think commercial enterprices have only 1 reason: They
> don't see a big enough revenue potential there.


No. Quite often they use third party code they are not allowed to
release. And often the business model for making money with FLOSS 
(usually providing services, customized versions or consulting) just
doesn't fit their business model.



>>> Another way things could happen is for the Linux community to
>>> support open source programmers with their dollars to create
>>> the software they seek. If one wanted a WYSIWYG editor
>>> like Dreamweaver, one could pay an amount to that project.
>> 
>> Quite often it's much more helpful to spend some time instead of
>> money, e.g. by reporting bugs and feature requests, providing patches,
>> writing documentation and keeping it up to date, providing
>> translations, creating artwork, examples, templates and stuff like
>> that, helping with user support on forums and mailing lists, creating
>> binaries or packages for various platforms, ...
>
> Sure, but I bet a lot of open source programmers would devote
> a whole lot more effort if they could actually live off of it.

But only a few would quit their job to make a living from donations.
And you need a lot of donations to fund even a small project with
only 2 or 3 developers.

But 50 people each giving an hour of qualified work per week can come
quite close to a developer working full time for the project.



   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>