From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Fri Mar 24 2000 - 19:13:56 PST
"Adam L. Beberg" <beberg@mithral.com> writes:
> > Free software enables programmers to deliver much greater value per
> > hour of work. Partly as a result, Cygnus's income per programmer is
> > considerably greater than Keane's.
>
> Sure it is, all that free help goes right to the bottom line :)
The company that I work for (Digital Creations, makers of Zope,
http://www.zope.org, whom I do not speak for etc. etc.) has been
opensourcing everything that we offer fairly rapidly. We'll still
make proprietary bits for people, but there are various incentives for
opensourcing everything that we make.
Opensourcing did unleash an army of free developers that isn't
entirely free. Organizing and communicating with them does take
resources, and because of the symbiotic relationship between employees
and the horde, there is some effort required to keep track of what is
going on. Shouting fire in the public discussion lists could be
damaging to the community & us. It's also interesting that lots of
the developers in the community are doing it for money (just not our
money).
Don't ask me to defend the opensource strategy of Zope. I'm just a
geek. There's support involved, yes, but there's also building and
extending. It helps that Zope is very much a platform, not an app -
it gives the developer a place to add lots of logic and interface with
many other components, so a Zope solution usually involves development
to do complex things. I think that the usual way is for a DC team to
implement a solution & the client to hire a Zope developer to stay.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.pobox.com/~kra/
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