syngod said:
I've dealt with quite a few businesses that have looked at the issue. While it may seem irrational, sure anyone can take over developing the product, but there main concern is over who's going to support it.
Really? The only company I've heard mention that issue so far is Microsoft themselves. I can only speak from my personal experiences, but vendor support has never been much of an issue for any companies I've ever worked with. That is, as long as there's
some kind of support available. In all fairness, 3rd-party support for MS products is often much better than MS's. In a worst case situation, Linux gives you the contingency of handling that situation yourself. If some doomsday scenario was to leave you with an unsupported, mission-critical piece of software, you could always hire somebody to fix it or even do it yourself. You don't have that luxury with proprietary software. My point is that even if your particular open-source airplane goes down, the terms of the license can act as your parachute. However, to my best knowledge this hasn't ever happend anyway. If a particular program was to be useful enough to base a business model on, and that development was to cease on that project, it would almost certainly be picked up by another group and development would continue.
syngod said:
It's the same concern that Red Hat has banked their business model on and the same reason MS can make a nice profit off of support calls.
Yep. But Linux is not a corperation, it's more of a movement in which several corperations choose to participate. Many companies are perfectly happy with a 100% non-corperate Linux solution (i.e. Debian, Slackware). That means the product is 100% free, community supported, and of course there are plenty of firms that offer heavy-duty, for-profit IT support on even these free-only offerings.
syngod said:
Proprietary software runs the same pitfalls that a devloper can go belly up, but alot of companies I've talked to don't see how giving the product away can be a viable business and don't want to risk having a company fold and be left with no support or having to switch to a different Linux vendor.
First of all, the product already belongs to us, as in you and I, as much as anybody else. There is no question of giving it away, since we already have legal usage of it. If you choose to purchase a Linux vendors wares, it's the support you're paying for (and maybe some proprietary software addons), not GNU/Linux itself. The code is released under the GPL, which gives us many liberties on how we use the code and protects those liberties quite eloquently, guarenteeing the availability of the code and the usage thereof. It's not a question of whether or not to posses Linux, but whether to utilize it.
Secondly, Linux is Linux is Linux. If one Linux distro was to go the way of the dodo, Linux marches on. The software is interoperable (because it's the same OS!), and any distro can be tuned to look like | act like | feel like |
be like any other distro. The only real difference between distros is focus. Which niche is the distro targeting, and what features they tend to put more weight upon. For the record, I think Red Hat is nowhere near the best Linux distro, and I don't feel it is indicitive of Linux in general. It's still a pretty good product, but I believe Suse, Mandrake, and many other distros surpass Red hat in many ways, despite common functionality. Try each out individually some time, and I think you'll see what I mean.
syngod said:
MS on the other hand most companies know that unless their is some major accounting fraud going on that they have a long lasting sustainable business model, and that they will be able to have their support issues handled by one company.
This is perhaps the biggest misconception. Microsoft, by the terms of their own EULA, is in no way liable or responsible for their own code. In my opinion, the single biggest contributor to Microsoft's business model is breaking support with their own products, forcing perpetual upgrade. Aside from the obvious fact that the customer is the loser in this scenario, the product suffers in the process. An observation along this thread of logic, Microsoft software is in a constant beta state. Hear me out on this one: the moment their software gets close to being solid, stalwart and nearly perfected [Windows 2000], their profit-driven business model dictates that they must yank the carpet out from under their clients and add a new swath of bloated and useless features [Windows XP].
