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There's just never a dull moment here in the Linux blogosphere, whether there's big news being made at the moment or not. Some weeks, we have wild activity surrounding the latest moves from Canonical, for example, or perhaps Adobe's latest affront; such happenings are virtually guaranteed to generate some lively conversation. Even in other weeks, though, where the news days might seem slower, there's never a shortage of things to talk about. Case in point? Just last Monday, when all the Linux world was still waking up from the weekend, a lone voice rang out with the question, "is open source anti-profit?"
Has the "free/low-cost for personal use, non-free/high-cost for business use" been tried and failed? Just wondering.
That was the Xandros model in a nutshell, they had both a free home version and a low cost home version and the business desktop was $99 and the server was $499 IIRC. While the website is still up the OS itself hasn't been updated since 2009 so i'd say its another piece of roadkill on the Linux highway.
Ultimately it comes down to busted toilets folks, because its not the GUI that keeps users away from Linux, its the busted toilets. the flaky sound issues, the lousy drivers, things breaking on upgrade, badly written docs, inconsistent UI conventions, these are all boring, long, slow, thankless lousy jobs that NOBODY is gonna dedicate years of their life to do for free, they just won't.
In the end you have to allow companies to make money as you need someone to pay for the busted toilets to get fixed. the ONLY reason you have all this code is because humans love to create, its human nature. what humans do NOT love to do is fix nasty messes, especially other people's messes. All you get in the GPL model is new bugs and beta software because the incentive to fix it just isn't there, no money no fixee. The reason GPL works in servers is because corporations make money off the servers and so are willing to pay to fix it...well that and your competition charges insane prices for licenses for its server products so putting up with some busted toilets are easier when the choice is busted toilet or paying tens of thousands of dollars annually.
C'mon community, you are better than this, surely you can come up with a license that lets companies like canonical stay afloat fixing toilets while still being free to examine the code. time is nearly up, win 8 will most likely get Ballmer fired and the next CEO won't be as stupid. Either play to win or get off the field and right now you aren't playing to win, you're practically lying down on the field.
Ultimately it comes down to busted toilets folks, because its not the GUI that keeps users away from Linux, its the busted toilets. the flaky sound issues, the lousy drivers, things breaking on upgrade, badly written docs, inconsistent UI conventions, these are all boring, long, slow, thankless lousy jobs that NOBODY is gonna dedicate years of their life to do for free, they just won't.
In the end you have to allow companies to make money as you need someone to pay for the busted toilets to get fixed. the ONLY reason you have all this code is because humans love to create, its human nature. what humans do NOT love to do is fix nasty messes, especially other people's messes. All you get in the GPL model is new bugs and beta software because the incentive to fix it just isn't there, no money no fixee. The reason GPL works in servers is because corporations make money off the servers and so are willing to pay to fix it...well that and your competition charges insane prices for licenses for its server products so putting up with some busted toilets are easier when the choice is busted toilet or paying tens of thousands of dollars annually.
C'mon community, you are better than this, surely you can come up with a license that lets companies like canonical stay afloat fixing toilets while still being free to examine the code. time is nearly up, win 8 will most likely get Ballmer fired and the next CEO won't be as stupid. Either play to win or get off the field and right now you aren't playing to win, you're practically lying down on the field.
