Red Hat adopts Novell e-mail software

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Lost?

"If I write good software and as a result Red Hat
distributes it with their OS, how have I lost?"

You didn't get paid for your work and Red Hat gets the support income. But what if you did get the support income. Now you have a dilemma. If the software was written very well and is easy to implement, where is your support calls you want to charge for? Could you turn a profit and keep in operation? On the flip side, you can write sh177y software that nobody will adopt for the exception of the stupid ones, and you can rape them for support costs. Is that ethical?

I know what I wrote doesn't apply for the whole. MySQL for instance is well written software that is overly complicated and support is needed much of the time for the average user so I suppose money can be made there. Good thing MySQL wasn't made "easy to use" like an Apple product.

I was recently turned down by someone who was willing to pay me very fair prices to design for them a shopping cart system for an ecommerce site they are putting together. They then discovered the free product Zen Cart. It's well written easy to use software that they need little help with to deploy. It was too good to turn down and so I don't get paid.

Sure, the consumer won. But the person trying to make a living selling their expertise as opposed to giving it away lost. If I was a larger organization, and I had the responsibilities of paying employees, this trend could put me out of business and make them jobless.

Maybe I should resort to writing and publishing books for a living...

I think GNU should be renamed cancer. I think it is a damaging trend.

Posted by: rkadowns   Posted on: 07/23/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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