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Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?



On 26 Jan 2004 at 8:49, Raj Mathur wrote:

    Niall> Try selling free software to a mass market. You will
    Niall> fail. You can only sell free software to a business market
    Niall> profitably and therein lies a major problem - how to Niall>
    improve the lot of the home user who is lumbered with Niall>
    Microsoft.

Which implicitly postulates that selling software is the only way to
survive in the IT field.  Rather like assuming that selling
screwdrivers and wrenches is the only way to survive in the auto
market, as opposed to opening a repair shop.

Not at all. "Software as a service" can only be profitable when
dealing with businesses. Why? Because home users would be aghast to
pay yearly support contracts as Microsoft found when it tried.

Therefore there's no commercial interest in developing free software
for home users past developing a sufficient desktop to run office
tools. And let me highlight a fundamental problem with the Unix
design mentality - they don't care much about maintaining the ABI as
they're used to installing all their apps from source.

However see how Joe Bloggs likes this. They want to be able to
download a binary and run it. They don't want to mess around with
dependencies or compiling it, they just want it to go.

This is why Linux and BSD will never take a majority of the home
market. Perhaps a good minority of the techie crowd, but no more
until the ABI problem gets fixed. Which will be never, because most
Unix software nowadays isn't written that way and its development
mentality certainly isn't that way.

Does this explain my views?

Cheers,
Niall






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