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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:44 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by wertigon Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
But the thing is, in this model you don't give away your code to the general public, you merely give the code to a maintainer that is specialized in porting software. So what? You still send your “crown jewels” to some tiny company which probably does not have enough money in the bank to properly reimburse you in a case of the leak. Note that typically companies don't even have the source rights for all the components (witness mighty struggles when they want to open-source something) so even if you'll manage to placate internal legal dogs it's still will be mighty struggle to obtain sources for all the middleware used. Huge undertaking. And for what? For 1% of users? May be 2% if we are lucky? Are you joking? Such a model would fix most problems, but someone need to put up an app store and make it work with various distros. Sorry, but no. Such model may help with open sources packages (and thus it's probably worthwhile) and will include much derided “glorified bookmarks”, but most serious developers will just ignore it.
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:15 UTC (Mon) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant. It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely. So yes, I obviously believe this model has a future, and it's a better one than staticly compiling everything always...
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant. Consultant usually is given access to small piece of the code at time. Often it agrees to sign extensive and complicated agreements to see even that. And in any case that's for serious issue (security) which warrants serious efforts. 1% of market is just not enough to do something like this. Heck, 5-10% of the market (which MacOS owns) is not enough: companies which are contracted to port stuff to MacOS often receive some things only in binary form (that's why CrossOver for Redistribution is popular way to go in these cases)! IOW: consultant you are hiring plays by your rules and must convince you to do this or that. Access to the whole codebase is rare luxury which consultant rarely gets! Yet here you are starting from that premise… It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely. So what? Google is larger than both of them and it still is not trusted enough without extensive agreement negotiated separately for each piece of software. This process just does not scale.
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