Re: os discuss (http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/7263.html)

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Just like?  ..  maybe there are similarities  .. without the power to fire and
>>leave a person destitute  ..  without the (direct) salary for sure.
>Please don't forget the benefits of working for a
>corporation.  A corporation has provided me with a fine
>living for six years.  My medical needs are met.  I
>have retirement pot building.  Food, housing, clothing
>and even entertainment are all within my grasp.  Also,
>please don't concede too much power over my life to the
>corporation.  If this corporation doesn't keep me,
>another one will.

All true.  I've considering striking off on my own,  but the assurity of a
corporate nest is hard to leave.    I don think alot of OpenS work is done
inside corporations, however, so I don't see how this argues against OS. 
Companies like IBM, SGI, and others have been contributing to Open Source for
much longer than Linux has been around.  Maybe not GPL/GNU, but public
source-code none the less.

>It's easy to take pot shots at the bad points.  For
>example, If I worked on free software all the time and
>gave my work away, I would be "destitute without the
>(direct) salary for sure."

The operative part is "and gave my work away".  This depends on how you position
the software.  Is the software a "product" or a lead in.  Nothing is to stop you
from selling service/support contracts, accepting fees for modifications. 
OpenLDAP does this exactly.  The software is free,  but people put money in pots
for new features or documentation.  Developers can select a task,  and upon
completion/review they are awarded a % of the money.  These pots are not
neccesarily small change either.  Another model is the Merit gated daemon for
multiprotocol routing.  A "late" version is free and open source, the current
version is very much not free.  As new current versions are released,  the
previously current becomes free.  This gives corporations away to express "pull"
over what features are important in a much more direct manner than traditional
software development models,  and the lone-rogue developer can still chip in his
part.  Everyone wins.
 
>There are advantages to corporations just as there are
>advantages to free software.  

Yes,  but I see no way in which these are mutually exclusive.  Obviously someone
(or some corporation) may choose that they be exclusive.  But except in the case
of proprietary codec methods, etc.., which require it legally, I really can't
see how that benefits anyone.  
 
Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505