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Faulty Paradigms for Business Week

Faulty Paradigms for Business Week

Posted Oct 25, 2005 3:34 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
In reply to: Faulty Paradigms for Business Week by kirkengaard
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

I agree. I don't think anyone who has their heart in Open Source/Free Software should spend much effort worrying about marketplace issues. It is obvious how much of an advantage using Open Source can be for companies, if they use it on its own terms. The F/OSS ecosystem doesn't really care about any individual company's existance. Of course, it is *very nice* that Red Hat/Novell/etc employs many great F/OSS coders. But, it should be enough to show that the Linux ecosystem will move ahead - witness the existence of Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Apache, etc. This is software that can't be killed. To me, that's the whole point - not to be dependent on a vendor, unless you want to be. How many support contracts came to mean nothing as the company behind it imploded? Independence and freedom are what it is all about.

Business will exploit what is exploitable if it helps their profitability. If it can't do that because it doesn't see the evidence, well, that's their problem. Self-education and investigation should help them get over that.


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Faulty Paradigms for Business Week

Posted Oct 25, 2005 18:17 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Of course, it is *very nice* that Red Hat/Novell/etc employs many great F/OSS coders. But, it should be enough to show that the Linux ecosystem will move ahead - witness the existence of Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Apache, etc. This is software that can't be killed. To me, that's the whole point - not to be dependent on a vendor, unless you want to be.

Yes, probably this software can't be killed, but can be seriously hindered. I seem to remember a comment from Andrew Morton on this site that the load on the lkml drops during weekends nowadays, and this wasn't the case some years ago. I wonder how many of the kernel, GNOME or KDE developers are actually paid for their work on Linux - and don't forget that this software is included in Debian, Gentoo, etc. too.

Bye,NAR

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