RE: eBoxit

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Ian,

I'm about to disagree with you, which is unusual.

I agree with much of what you right, but I think you're in danger of
lumping together the "box shifters" who add very little to a GPL
product and then charge commercial rates, with the genuine
"value-add" consultants, who actually turn a generic product into
something useful for MY requriements.

I speak as a manager - someone who pays people to customise and support GPL
products for my needs. I also pay people to customise and support
copyrighted products likewise.

However, paying someone to customise a product, and then, more importantly,
enter into a support contract for it, is a VERY good way for me to proceed.

Does it harm the programmers who built the core product? No!

Is programming "the *real* work" and support the easy bit... No!
The normal metrics are that supporting a product in the field costs about 5
times as much as developing it. 

Regards,

Mark Harrison
Head of Systems, eKingfisher

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Lowe [mailto:ian@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 2 April 2002 18:58
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] eBoxit


hmm, yes, as I suspected.

This is IMO, the bigest reason why Linux is doomed to failure in the
long
term.

Those self same coders who donated millions of man horus of time free
of
charge now get to see someone ride the GPL right to the line, and bolt
some
noncy little bit of code on the top, less than a thousandth of a percent
of
the total codebase, then sell it as a proprietary solution.

sickening.

And of course, will ultimately drive away those selfless guys who did
the
*real* work.

Ian.




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