rockytriton Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 I'm sure you all have heard that Mozilla has formed a corporation. They say that they just want to generate revenue for further development but remain non-profit, at least that's what I get from what I have read so far. What do you guys this of this? To me, it sounds like they want to generate enough money to pay developers and basically work as a software company but they won't have to pay taxes and help the economy. I don't see what the difference really is besides the fact that they won't be contributing to our economy, and that seems bad rather than good to me. I suppose I may be completely wrong about everything, I'm just trying to understand how this is a good thing. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UncleAl Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Why is giving money to Washington a good thing? The money I make belongs to me and my family, not to a government stooge who takes a cut and dumps the rest on slum bunnies for squirting out babies. Rather than foster brilliance, we allocate for its suppression. Homeland Severity? War on Drugs? War on Poverty? BATF? Iraq? Project Head Start? HUD? Night Basketball? NASA? Washington can burn in Hell on its own nickel. Paying $(US)5-10 for Firefox is OK with me. Somebody must pay for the servers. Anything that competently spits in Microsoft's face has my support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IrishEyes Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Why is giving money to Washington a good thing? The money I make belongs to me and my family... Paying $(US)5-10 for Firefox is OK with me. Somebody must pay for the servers. Anything that competently spits in Microsoft's face has my support.Can I get an "AMEN" from the crowd on that one?I can not tell you how much I agree with you, UA. There just aren't adequate words to describe my total support for your position on this particular topic. And as usual, your delivery is both unique and titilating.Thanks for the grin, and thumbs up on the (rather short) diatribe! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 To echo an actual truth from the fiscal conservatives "corporations don't pay taxes: they raise prices and lower dividends to cover them"... I've been worried about Mozilla, and as I needled alexander in another thread yesterday: "If all software is free, we will all be free to have no software." As Uncle Al sez: someone's got to pay for the servers and also programmers got to eat (I have one friend who's e-mail signature line is "will code for food" :) ).... Cheers,Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nkt Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 I agree. One thing most people miss is that free software only arises when everyone is full. If you were on the verge of starvation, then you would code for money, rather than fun, or you would go hunt a cow, or something. Only because the developers gets paid a good salary can they afford to develop free software. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Gosh people I think that you have lost track of what Free means in Open Source!It is one thing to be free of charge, it is another to be free as in Open Source, as Richard Stallman once said:"Free as in freedom not as in free beer"I have no problems paying for software, as long as:1) it is not proprietary2) it is not closed-source3) i can read the license before actually buying the software4) it is developed with open technology and does not require proprietary tools to run Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C1ay Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Heck I was paying for Netscape when MS started giving IE away. I'd pay for Firefox to avoid IE even if MS offered to pay me to use IE. I don't expect something for nothing and neither should anyone else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted August 6, 2005 Report Share Posted August 6, 2005 Someone proposed to pay me $1000 to permanently switch to windows and not use Linux on any of my machines for 5 years, and i had absolutely no problem with declining it before he finished telling me his terms... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffy Posted August 6, 2005 Report Share Posted August 6, 2005 Someone proposed to pay me $1000 to permanently switch to windows and not use Linux on any of my machines for 5 years, and i had absolutely no problem with declining it before he finished telling me his terms...Man that's 3 years and 4 months of VOIP service alexander!!!! I'm proud of you! I wouldn't have listened to the terms either: the price would have to go up to $1m for me! (although admittedly, I *have* to use Windows in order to support my customers who use it... silly customers! silly need to actually make money! Whee!) You can read my response to the "open != free" over in the Seminar Topics thread: I agree, I have questions about how effective the model will be for anything other than OS's, programming languages, databases and other "fundamental" tools... Cheers!Buffy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nkt Posted August 7, 2005 Report Share Posted August 7, 2005 It is interesting. The point about whether the Open Source model will work for things that are not "shiny" was the original question, years ago, but that's been more than answered by the re-writing of some very obscure bits and peices. Buffy, you are saying the opposite, that it would only be the fundamental things like databases and the OS, but these are the ones that are still in development. They are different in one important way, because they are open-ended, and large. The smaller stuff, it tends to get re-written in a few weeks by someone, then released. There is no point in growing a huge developer base for something that is only a few hours or a few days of programming for one person. Once someone spots something that they need, and they find it costs £££s for a little bit of functionality they need, they either write a little bit of code to do it themselves, then release it, or they go to a larger application, and write a small add-on for that. The one issue I do see is that there will be a few things that are too big for a one or two-man team, but aren't enough, or are not cool enough, for anyone to be bothered. I don't know of anything like this, though. I mean, I've just been to What the Hack, and seen self-organisation at work, getting bins cleaned, heavy work done, bars tended, even loos sorted out(!) because one person leads, and a few others jump right in to get the job done, no matter how nasty. I do forsee another issue, though, which is kind of related, which is that small software developers are going to have more difficulty controlling their code bases, and charging enough money to support themselves, purely because of the number of open alternatives that are being created, of which most are free. If we kill M$, it is likely to kill most of the small software developers too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted August 8, 2005 Report Share Posted August 8, 2005 Actually I dont agree that killing M$ will kill small software companies, of anything i think that it will make more small software companies. Yearly M$ overrides numerous software companies by providing products that are in development at those small companies faster and with better support. M$ never comes up with creative ideas themselves, they just go to a small company, and say, "Hey thats pretty cool thing you are doing, why dont we have a hundred our developers jump on a thing program like that?". Infact they kill other OS development, M$ just payed 800mill to IBM for killing OS/2, they have stolen everything that they have ever created from somewhere else, maybe with exception of DOS, Windows, and all Office package Ideas have all been stolen from other, smaller and larger companies by M$ for years, so I'd argue that killing off a large company such as M$ will infact make small companies flurish. You also have to remember that small companies such as Firefox, can produce Open-source code under the GPL2 or something, and they can still market and sell their product... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted August 8, 2005 Report Share Posted August 8, 2005 Man that's 3 years and 4 months of VOIP service alexanderLol, I have better things to spend my money on then VOIP, I could use a new AMD64 Laptop for example... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rockytriton Posted August 8, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 8, 2005 isn't it illegal to give your product away for free to get people to stop using your competition and then start selling it??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alexander Posted August 8, 2005 Report Share Posted August 8, 2005 they are not selling anything yet, not that i think that they ever will! They have become a corporation, yeah, but all that says is if everything goes wrong and they get sued out of existance, everyone that works for firefox will pick up their stuff and walk, not that they will sell their product! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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