Re: [ossig] FOSSCON 2005

[Ditesh <ditesh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>Agreed, and couldn't be said better. People aren't convinced by the
>idealogy, they still want to make the ultimate buck, in the end
>
>  
>
People aren't convinced by ideology?! Dude, tell that to the many 
thousands of people releasing FOSS projects under the GPL primarily 
because they _are_ convinced by the ideology. The ideology is 
fundamentally that sharing is Good, and trust me, not all people are 
bastards. People enjoy sharing, the Internet be my witness in this regard.

As for making money, let me say it again: it's not in conflict with 
FOSS. You don't lose the ability to make money with FOSS, its just that 
you got to re-think licensing differently.  Before Mr Gates popularized 
the world of proprietary licensing, the idea of copyrighting software 
was considered unique and perhaps even slightly odd. People were not 
sure if s/ware could even be copyrighted. How did you think tech 
companies survived then? By having a different business model, of course.

You speak business language to business people, you speak dev and 
idealogue language to dev and SI people etc etc. FOSSing is not at odds 
with business, because if it was, somebody had better tell IBM and 
RedHat and Novell quick.

>Why its still misunderstood, I wonder...
>
Because people don't even grok normal licensing issues, much less 
copyleft licensing issues?

>But agreed, it would be great if more folk from .my actually started
>coding, submitting patches, etc... Advocacy is boring, and empty
>promises to the international/bigger projects are ridiculous (makes
>Malaysians look bad too)
>  
>
Just to point out that past and ongoing Malaysian coding efforts have 
been compiled by a list for your viewing pleasure:

http://www.iosn.net/country/malaysia/malaysian_foss_contributors

Ditesh


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