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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (18875)	5/3/1998 4:13:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 24154

When somebody from Peoria posts a bug fix, how do you know, without replicating the bug, exactly what bug is being fixed? Usually the bug is of the form of a true error in the code that does not cause a problem except under special conditions. Once you locate the problem in the source code, it can be very obvious what is wrong and what the fix is. Consider this analogy: I am designing a car and I give out "beta" cars to friends to test-drive. Someone tells me 'my car halted on the freeway yesterday.' Unless I look at the car, I don't know what happened. But suppose someone tells me 'my car halted on the freeway and I checked it out and you're using too thin a wire for the amount of power you're sending through it so it overheated and broke.' I know to use a thicker wire. Basically, finding the location of the error is the important part-- even if Netscape just logs the errors and does their own fixes, it goes much much faster than without getting the source code location of the error. Re: multiple versions-- Yeah, I don't have much to back up my intuition that multiple versions won't be much of a problem. And, perhaps the dumbest question of all: How will Netscape make money doing this? You could ask that of Microsoft :). Look at it this way-- Netscape so far has made a lot of money on stuff other than their browser. They made those sales in part because of the ubiquity of their browser. I believe that's the general argument.

To: Gerald R. Lampton who wrote (18875)	5/4/1998 12:46:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Respond to of 24154

This is a posting from a registration-based forum. I'm not sure of the copyright laws, but I think nobody will sue me. It's from the CEO of an open-source company and the post is: forums.infoworld.com Make money writing GPL/OS code (LONG) Posted by: front Date posted: Sat May 2 12:06:42 PDT 1998 As a company that has been making money developing sound drivers for Linux, I can say that there is money to be made in Open Source Software. Our Model The model we use is, we make a version of our source code available under Open Source or GPL (see the linux kernel sound drivers (/usr/src/linux/drivers/sound) and then sell the commercial product (read: Binary-only Software) with features such as ease-of-use, gui, tech support, and support for soundcards that are developed under NDA. This way you gain the goodwill of users who believe in the Open Source movement and programmers who are willing to fix your bugs and enhance your software but at the same time you address the needs of "newbie" and "corporate" users who want handholding and someone to be responsible (aka to blame). How to make money You make your Open Source software only available for Free OSs like Linux/FreeBSD and then develop commercial products (binary-only ) for other systems like Solaris, SCO, AIX, NT, BeOS and others. This way you get a revenue source from the commercial world and get to become a hero in the Open Source world...look we all have to eat and pay taxes. Even the most die hard Open Source/GPL warrior will not begrudge you that! The BIG pay-off If you become big and famous in the free world, commercial application or operating system vendors like IBM, Sun or MS will take notice of you and would prefer licensing your commercial code since they don't like to ship GPL'ed source code with their products. They don't want their customers doing "make installs". Maybe Microsoft buys you out some day ;-) Advantages of GPL/OS software If you GPL or OS your software then ONLY YOU can make money off YOUR efforts. Even if someone rips your code and enhances it, they CANNOT sell it for profit. Disadvantages If someone releases a GPL'ed version of your work, ofcourse, you stand to lose money in the freeware OS markets because now something is available for free that was previously only available in your commercial verion. But the commercial world may still be viable. You cannot make money writing ONLY Open Source software and hope that you make a profit doing tech support or selling manuals. This is a problem with RMS's GNU policy. People will tend to rely on USENET for free Tech Support and sooner or later, you'll find a site with HTML version of your docs. The only people making money in the pureset GPL/Open Source world are hardware vendors and CD-ROM distributors. That's why very few GPL/OS-Only software companies exist. Most GPL-Only software comes from Universities and Research places cause people have day jobs to tide them over. How to compete with GPL/OS developers on YOUR products? Don't rest on your laurels...you just have to keep innovating - like you-know-who ;-). Build some proprietary (read: Intellectual Property) stuff in your commercial version that makes even the most hardcore open source users/developers want your commercial product. In short, make your commercial product simply brilliant (if you can't do this, stick to your day job - you're better off working for someone else!) Caveats For heavens' sake document the API or allow people to implement freeware versions independantly (you'll see that there's only a handful of people who are actually capable of duplicating your work). The rest of the computing world is just full of users and consumers. Secondly, forget about charging MegaBucks for UNIX software...the old days are over! Make it affordable and get as many users on your software as possible. Hope this helps you budding Open Source entrepreneurs out there! Best regards Dev Mazumdar President/CEO 4Front Technologies opensound.com (Home of OSS)