[hcflinux] Re: My bottom line.

[steveoc]

To the original poster of this interesting thread :

I believe that your points are valid, in as much that you are saying to
the development community - "At the end of the day, your 'product' must
compete - be better, faster, cheaper than the status quo alternative".

That is indeed the case. Open Source or not, all linux products must be
able to stand on their own merits at the end of the day.

However, you have plugged into a development process that is still in
its early stages, and you are witnessing first hand the pain, and cost
in both time and money that Linux developers voluntarily undergo in
order to produce something of this nature. 

There are thousands of such projects underway, and in all cases the
amount of time and money spent by linux developers is insane if you
compare the cost of just going out and buying the shrink wrapped
alternative. From a short term point of view, it is hard to justify by
pure price performance comparisons - open source or not.

When you look at the developers, you wont find them complaining and
whinging about this - there are no martyrs in the development community
- the payback is rather Zen, and does not fit well with traditional
western economic thinking. 

The root causes of your frustrations re Pricing are the simple fact that
certain companies are holding on to what they consider to be "their" IP,
and not allowing users of their product to have access to the code. This
is a stain on the current state of the industry, and the open source
development community has almost single-handedly fixed the problem by
slowly taking one thing at a time, and re-engineering it as open source.
This represents a huge sacrifice by zillions of volunteers over many
years, motivated by nothing more than the desire to change the world.

Looking back in hindsight - Id say that yes, the world in now a better
place, and the future is now open to anyone. Without this effort, the
average joe would not be able to take a crap without having paid their
license fees. 

Thats not the sort of world I want to live in, so I say to the Linmodem
crew - name your price. Its not really a bad deal - in the past the
price of freedom was often blood, these days you can buy it for a
fistful of dollars. Who's to complain about that ?

SteveOC