On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Florin Iucha wrote: > Maybe because the times have changed. In the 60s and 70s, the software > was "free", you were getting it with the big iron. In the 80s and 90s, > companies realized there is value that can be extracted from the marked > and started closing up the source. In the late 90s and 00s, companies > realized the benefit of openness. Remember when Sun charged Kevin > Mitnick with 'stealing' some hundreds of millions of $ for peeking at > the SunOS/Solaris code? And then, a few years later they open sourced > it? Java? Remember how 'controlling' it was important? And now it is > not? > > Nothing _fundamentally_ changed during this time span. Software is > _hard_ (like hunting down mammoths and lions) and cooperatively we can > make it better for all. It is just the perceptions that are swinging > one way or another. I think, over time, several things have been changing that gradually alter the payoffs for different kinds of development work and distribution strategies. For one, the web didn't used to be there, but now it is there, and that drops distribution prices to almost zero. You used to have to package and ship stuff and you needed workers to handle orders, etc., but that is over. With that, the competitive landscape has changed a lot. All the big iron sellers had their own UNIX OSs that they distributed with their machines. The money was more in the machine than in the OS but the OS helped to create vendor lock-in. With the advent of a fairly stable Linux OS, and many young workers having experience with it, many buyers wanted to run Linux on their hardware. So *all* of the major sellers started to offer Linux as an alternative to their proprietary OS -- IBM (AIX), HP (HPUX), Sun (Solaris), HP/Compaq/DEC (Tru64), etc. Now that massive amounts of GPL'd code is available, a developer can decide to use it and get something working very quickly, or he can use BSD-licensed code, if there is enough, or develop from scratch. It is often way quicker and easier to use pre-existing GPL'd code. In the final analysis, a developer today who uses GPL might end up making more dollars per hour for his development work by using GPL software than by making a proprietary program. It depends on a lot of factors, including the potential for competition from free software projects. Anyway, just some of my ideas and observations. Mike