a joint venture of open source business interests?

Story: An Open Letter to Linux DevelopersTotal Replies: 1
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lastangelman

Apr 30, 2005
2:17 AM EDT
I would imagine that a distribution like Red Hat, Novell/SuSE or other major distros or even a consortia of known business interests in the open source community should address this problem by beginning and funding open source projects that would be comparable to such products discussed offered by Intuit, et alia. Offer incentives for coders who devote themselves solely to such projects. Then members of the consortia (and anybody else) can sell subscription support services for these projects much like they do for their enterprise level distributions. My assumption is Linus Torvalds would agree vociferously with helios's assertions. For open source/free software to ultimately succeed, there must be comparable quality projects out there that can compete with proprietary products. These projects can be developed much like Open Office.org, Mozilla/Firefox, etc., or perhaps begun by some enterprising coders and allowed to blossom much like the GNU/Linux kernel. All projects should be written for the unknowledgeable end user's ease of use in mind, whether the project will be deployed at the enterprise level or mere personal/home use. The hobbyist/hacking aspects fostered the community in the past; now it has all become a serious business with rewards as yet untold for everyone involved in a sense that goes beyond any implied financial and material gain or even the personal satisfaction of having contributed something useful to the community and the world at large. Unless unenlightened forces attempt and or succeed to stymie what has been mushrooming for the past couple of decades, the ideas and philosophies espoused and practiced by the open source and free software community will transcend software and be applied other aspects of society as a whole, hopefully taking us all to the next step where we are all going on this journey.
AnonymousCoward

May 01, 2005
5:23 PM EDT
Here in Oz, the vets are getting sick of the one main Oz vet software distributor mistreating them: http://www.openvpms.org/

The first article on that page is a link I fed them, saying "You Are Not Alone: RSA dairy farmers are doing this too": http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=374

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