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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (2326)	10/13/2000 11:57:51 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

Gratuitous post just to get my link on the page with an annoying blurb about open source stuff. Open source is really neat. But who is going to devote all their spare time to writing it if your spare time is not compensated :) Dare I be heretical? I still think we need a genius economic model. Tucows shareware is getting lamer these days as their sites get ever more labyrinth with regard to finding the software you need. If their are 2,000 packages on Linux these days, what does a body need that they would pay for? First and foremost one has to try it out. It has to be really worth the salestalk and the need to plunk down hard earned. Even one dollar per item would be a bit much for most of us. I will bet that if you added up teh bucks from all the tucows software, not one percent of which I would pay for, you would not get enough revenue to support one decent company. Shareware was that way, lots of share and not much buy. Only one person I had ever heard of made any money at it. That was the guy who wrote PC file and PC write in the old days. I used both. Spare, well written programs that did something useful. (Actually PC file was buggy in practice and I stopped using it.) As soon as they became shrink wrap it disappeared. It would only survive as shareware. Funny. We need a programmer's clearinghouse of decent software. Most programmers cannot afford to market and cannot afford the time to do sales and support web sites. We should get together and do something like that. Writing a good trial model that worked and would not be easy to crack might be in order too. The security of that is not paramount though. 99% of the people who use the site will co-operate and the leaks in the boat are not so important as its over all ability to reach the new world. Every program leaks to the underground. But some are successful and some are not. For a program to be successful it should be transparent to learn, ie intuitive and helpful to use and configure. This leaves out a lot of well written power packages (mutt) that appeal only to university trained sysadmins who are touch typists and whose idea of a good time is to read a DEC manual :) Don't you just love programs whose names don't give you a whistling clue as to what they do? The two most successfull areas of programming today are pirate software and open source software. Pirwate software is successful because shrink wrap stuff is vapour ware and too damn hard to use, backup, too buggy and too hard to keep current without having to buy the new version every six months. Bill Gates can hire hundreds of secret service agents to chase down pirate disk makers and write ever more clever viruses to pollute those same disks but he just doesn't get it. Open source is a revolution, as wrong headed economically as it is presently modeled, with a cause. The Tea is in the harbour. E. Charters Netlinux netlinux.dynip.com mailto:echarters@primus.ca