Re: Any experience with "The Last One"?

From: Gerry Quinn (gerryq_at_indigo.ie)
Date: 11/29/03 

Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 08:46:55 GMT

In article <BBED9DEE966813E6D@10.0.1.2>, slavins@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) wrote:
>In article <ui%wb.2059$nm6.16336@news.indigo.ie>,
>gerryq@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote:

>>Freeware is not a new invention. Nobody has ever prevented anyone from
>>making software to be given away, or software of such low quality or
>>targeted to such demographics as to be effectively unsaleable.
>
>But nobody forsaw the extent to which programs would be given
>away. There's no other industry that works like that: it
>requires no raw materials, and a product produced for one person
>can be used by other people with only a tiny increment in cost.
>Big Music business has the problem that the way they want their
>industry to run, their product has to have an income: their
>artists expect to have no job besides earning money from their
>music. Open Source programmers fully expect to earn money by
>doing another job, then come home and do their programming in
>their spare time. And they don't mind !

Sure, but they don't produce software of equal quality. A particular
issue is that programmers like to tinker with code, but are not
interested in the needs of end-users other than themselves. And a
software product is far more than a program - the graphical and other
assets often are lacking.

People play music as a hobby too. It's music, and it's free (heck, you
might pay them to stop). Why aren't artists and their publishing
companies worried about this?

>And the type of group-formation enabled by the internet makes
>this far more extreme. Before the internet the only free
>programs were the result of the united efforts of, at most, two
>or three people. With the open source movement, you can find
>software co-written by thousands of people in their spare time
>(e.g. Linux) available for free download.
>
>It is /this/ that's troubling management and large companies: the
>fact that it costs a huge amount of money to employ 100 people
>to do /anything/ yet the product they produce is in competition
>with another one which has almost no cost, was written by
>hobbyists who will happily work 'till 2am to improve the look
>of the end result and who do not expect to earn money from it.
>/This/ is the reason Microsoft and SCO are fighting open source
>so desperately: it's not a loss of control, it's the fear that
>they'll be competing with a product as good as theirs but free.

SCO aren't fighting open source - they are hoping to earn compensation
for copyright violations they allege are embedded in Linux.

Linux (assuming it can successfully refute SCO's accusations) cannot
realistically compete with Windows in non-techie niches (where
engineers can deploy it out of the sight of end-users, it has some
advantages). What MS don't want is legal judgements which are basically
intended to cripple their product and reduce it to the same
user-unfriendly level as open source - for example attempts to force the
removal of the browser from Windows, or attempts to force them to
standardise interfaces, which could lead to Windows installations having
an unpredictable mixture of third-party components.

- Gerry Quinn

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