[10309] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Debating the NII "Truisms"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Deutsch)
Fri Feb 18 06:18:23 1994
From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 10:24:19 -0500
In-Reply-To: Brad Cox @ GMU/PSOL's message as of Feb 14, 20:40
To: bcox@gmu.edu (Brad Cox @ GMU/PSOL), com-priv@psi.com
Cc: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney)
Glenn Tenney wrote
> Turns out one Japanese company felt differently. That company took the
> public domain software, made a few changes to commercialize it, and turned
> around and sold it for, if I recall, something like $400,000 a pop. And
> quite a few US chip manufacturers bought it.
>
> So, your comments about "free stuff" are slightly off base... There is
> actually a huge amount of valuable stuff that is free. The problem is that
> some peoples' (primarily corporate) perception of value is that if they
> can't own it, then it is not valuable -- and therefore treat it like waste.
Actually, there's more to it that whether they can "own
it". Corporate purchasing agents get asked lots of
questions about such issues as system maintainability,
on-going support, their prospects for interaction with the
software used by their customers and suppliers and more
(and remember, to companies without their own internal set
of UNIX geeks maintainability does not mean source, it
means access to somebody else's set of geeks. Some people
really don't want to be in the software business and are
happy to pay someone else to be).
Such considerations may well outweigh the perceived
superiority of a feature set from another, unsupported
program for a specific application. To focus on source is
to leave yourself open to the danger of a "local
optimization" at the expense of the bigger picture.
When most people purchase a car, they don't ask whether
the engineering drawings are available to allow them to
remachine the heads and modify the camshaft for better
performance at the expense of worsening fuel economy (or
vice versa). They ask questions about the warranty, the
number of dealers in their neck of the woods, the
availability of spare parts in five years and so on. From
their point of view these issues are more important than
strict engineering maintainability, since they don't want
to do that anyways.
Now, I'm not arguing for "no source" in all cases, (we've
given away a few things to the net ourselves here at
Bunyip) but we do need to be careful not to see the
customers of that Japanese company as poor unwitting
dupes. Perhaps the fact that someone has pledged to
continue to support the product was seen as worth the
money to them.
- peterd
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