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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Revenue Models
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Alan Williamson has some concerns about Open Source and revenue:
But is there is an open-source model in other industries? What if an airline operated an open-source policy? Flying would be free, first-come-first-served, but the inflight meal (aka the service) would cost $400! Would such a policy work for the airline industry?
What about the automobile industry? Ford would give us all cars for free, but the servicing would be more frequent and be x100 what the typical service is now.
It's kind of ironic hearing this on a Java blog site. The problem isn't Open Source - the problem is in the model espoused by Sun for Java - where you give away the development tools (and applications, in many cases), and then act positively stunned when there's no revenue. The two things need to be separated - because Java (for instance) is "free", but not open source.
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