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



On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 10:47:04PM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
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.

Perhaps things would have been different had Microsoft not been
charging for the original license of their software and then again for
what is (or is perceived as) bug fixing? I can't know and I have
trouble seeing how you can.

There is a quickly growing industry of people who make money from home
users to troubleshoot and fix their software. I know many people
employed doing exactly this.

Therefore there's no commercial interest in developing free software 
for home users past developing a sufficient desktop to run office 
tools.

I think that you are creating overarching conclusions based on very
shaky propositions. I also think your opinion of what it means to use
a computer at home is extremely uncreative.

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.

I reinstalled my laptop with one version of Debian and upgraded the
entire system it twice (including libc upgrades) and have not invoked
yet a compiler. Every major Linux distribution (No, Gentoo is not a
major Linux distribution yet) is binary only.

If you'd discussed and implemented as many ABI/API distribution wide
ABI migrations as I had, I think you'd be less quick and
uncompromising in your statements.

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.

Have you heard of the LSB? Pan-distro binary comparability *is*
important to many developers in the *NIX world and it's been the
subject of some of the most active and exciting Linux development in
the last few years -- by volunteers, businesses and for both home and
business users.

There's a proposal right now to put LSB and ABI compatibility into the
Debian social contract!

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.

Good thing there are lot more people working on things like LSB and
pan-Linux binary compatibility than people like you sitting around
explaining why the project is doomed to failure. The LSB wouldn't be
on version 1.3 with support in every major distro yet if the situation
were reversed.

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/



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