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Re: [Sheflug] The Economics of Open Source Software - Prospects,Pitfalls and Politics [tbm [at] cyrius.com]



Simon Brown <simon [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk> writes:

> From debian-uk, food for thought?
>
>> MICROSOFT RESEARCH LECTURE
>> This is a PUBLIC lecture
>> ________________________________
>>
>> TITLE: The Economics of Open Source Software - Prospects, Pitfalls and  
>> Politics
>> SPEAKER: Dr Stefan Kooths
>> INSTITUTION: University of Muenster

There's a whole paper here:

http://mice.uni-muenster.de/mers/mers4-OpenSource_en.pdf

For the most part, I think he's missing the point.  He hasn't spent
much time in the open source world.  The basic argument is that
without users paying for software, there's no incentive to make the
software the users want the most.  

But the reality is that open source doesn't deal with this as poorly
as he thinks (e.g. he admits that for those people programming as a
means of showing off, a successful project is better than an
unsuccessful one, but then ignores that this provides an incentive to
ask users what they want).  Secondly, if you look at Linux development
most of the people (if you measure by lines of code written) are
getting paid to do it, e.g. by a distributor, consulting company, or
whatnot.

-- 
Eric E. Moore

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