Re: [ossig] FOSSCON 2005

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 20:02 +0800, Ditesh wrote:
> >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.

We of the Internet age, are different. We FOSS people are different. We
"get it". The majority of folk out there don't

> 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.

Exactly. This is why people _misunderstand_ FLOSS licensing. You can
make as much money as you want, IMHO. Look at where Red Hat is today ;-)

> 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.

I think the devs tend to not speak business language to business
people... Well, I'll come up with a nice resource list soon of ways to
make money with FOSS. Here in Bangalore, I've got lots of folk asking
such questions too, scarily enough

> >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

Thanks for the list Ditesh :)
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, 
then you win." -- Mohandas Gandhi


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