Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Troll Tech [was Re: Sco vs. IBM]
From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
Cc: Scott Robert Ladd <coyote@coyotegulch.com>,
       Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>, jgarzik@pobox.com,
       lawrence@the-penguin.otak.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 16:39, Larry McVoy wrote:
> That's probably a good enough test case.  Explain to me how your support
> contracts are ever going to provide enough money to redo GCC or build
> something equally substantial.

> I'm not saying that you can't make a living doing support, you obviously
> can.  I'm saying that it doesn't produce enough income to do what needs
> to be done. 

Now we actually isolate a point on which perhaps we disagree.

If there are things which _need_ to be done, but which no individual
customer is willing to pay for in Free Software, one of the following
things will happen:

 1. They'll revert to proprietary software.
 2. They'll club together with other users of the software and fund it.
 3. The contractors (us) will 'tax' them enough on the stuff they _are_ 
	willing to pay for to do it in the background.

I see plenty of evidence that #2 and #3 are actually happening in real
life. I've also seen a lot of #1 of course, but I suspect its frequency
will be decreasing over the coming years.

I certainly wouldn't assert that #1 will die out altogether, but neither
will the non-existence of #2 and #3 cause the Free Software bubble to
burst.  

> If it did then CVS would be BK, for example.

That's possibly a better example than your previous one of GCC, but
without disrespect to your achievements I still suspect it would have
happened, and indeed will happen, eventually.

-- 
dwmw2

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