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.