Constellation

Chipp Walters chipp at chipp.com
Fri Oct 21 13:10:31 EDT 2005


Hi Ben,

I certainly understand the allure of open source-- and am thankful for
it. Interestingly, it is not totally the 'free spirited not for profit'
many believe it to be, as many of those who are involved have sound
business (commercial money-making) reasons for doing so-- like IBM and
Linspire.

In fact there are entire business strategies around how to profit from
starting an open source project.

Take MySQL for instance. If you want to use it for your company, you
must pay a license fee (and it's not that small either).

I look at all software as tools (I'm not a gamer;-), and I always ask
myself what the benefit of a purchased software tool is to me vs the
time I would need to create it or download a 'free' version. For
instance, TechSmith makes Camtasia, a fine commercial product for 
capturing screen activity and making a movie of it. I know there are a 
lot of freeware and opensource alternatives, but I choose the Camtasia 
product because it's more robust, has more features, and is better 
supported. I'm willing to trade $$$ for this convenience. Others are not 
and that's certainly their perogative!

I believe Richard Gaskin said it quite well on an earlier post:

"The irony of GPL is that it can unfairly favor the wealthy:  common
workers need to eat and pay rent, leaving only those with sufficient
wealth for significant leisure projects able to work on GPL stuff.  Once
this wealth is applied to an application category, "free" can have the
same effect as the antitrust violation of "dumping", driving working
people out of the market leaving only the product driven by unrelated
wealth.

Sorry Mr. Stallman, but that's what happens in a "gift economy" when
programmers are the only ones gifting while landlords and grocers still
expect to be paid."

That said, I think OS projects can work in Rev. Take a look at the 
MetaCard IDE for instance, it's all open sourced (though it didn't start 
that way).

Regarding multiple users working together, I have an interesting story.

Richard Gaskin, Jacque Gay and I all have our own property editor
plugins which display ALL the rev control props, not just the ones the
Rev IDE lets you see. So, we decided to group our ideas and make a
single 'super' object prop editor in an 'open source' sort of way, and
include it in the standard Rev IDE distro. Sounds like a fairly simple idea.

Now, I believe all three of us to be competent Rev programmers,
each with a couple commercial apps coded in Transcript under our belt. 
As we sat down to do this simple task, it became evident the management 
of the decision process was much more 'time and process intensive' than 
just writing the damn thing, which any of us could do easily!

Truly a valuable insight to me. I don't think it ever got finished. At 
least it's not in the distro at this time. We all just had too much 
other stuff to do. (I notice in a previous post of yours, you too, have 
similar time constraints for creating 'free' stuff).

Now that's only a single instance, but does point out how sometimes it's 
  much easier to sit down and write your own product, sell it or give it 
away, than work with a group to develop it. In fact, most my free 
plugins are developed just this way. I have a need, develop for myself 
and give it to the community.

best wishes,

Chipp

Ben Fisher wrote:
> It seems like a lot of the plug-ins and tools 
> for Revolution lately are being sold.

> However, I am always more attracted to free 
> open-source projects, not just because of the price, but also because
>  of the spirit. Developers helping each other, one of the reasons I 
> subscribe to this list. If I download open-source code, I can 
> contribute to the project. All fellow developers can profit from my 
> contributions, and not just the few who can afford to buy.




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