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Yep. Lower risk and in case of risk, the risk is borne
by the software vendor. Who bears the risk if the
vendor is a company delivering open source? As I
understand it, the company making the delivery. So,
for Linux, that would be IBM, Red Hat, etc. Now if
these companies refuse to assume that risk, they
will have some problems selling it. In the contracting
world, that is called "indemnification". If the big companies
won't indemnify a product or service, big buyers back
off the deal. Read your RFPs. The only advantage to
open source there is escrow and even then, maybe not
because versions, etc., have to be accounted for.
Meanwhile, the less risky bets are on the companies
that have already licensed the necessary pieces from
their owners for either cash or value in kind.
Companies without value in kind are forced to use
cash. Companies with value in kind can create
perfectly straightforward and legal trading aggreements
that maintain cash assets while obtaining rights.
It makes indemnification not just cheap, but free.
Oh, and it makes getting more IP a high value quest.
So innovation is guaranteed the old fashion way: earn it.
So just as the same people who talked frictionless
economy and the rest of the rot of the dot.bomb are
now talking about the disappearance of IP in software,
the importance of IP is on the increase as it represents
a quite powerful value in kind. The open source
community must be very careful not to believe that
what they have is more valuable than the IP being
traded in kind. Netscape did the same dumb thing.
But it's just more fun to lay into MS than to
understand the big picture. MSPhobia a neat
distraction; keeps 'em welded together in a
common cause against a common perceived enemy,
and keeps 'em just as blind and witless and
ready to make the same mistakes Netscape made.
Cui bono?
len
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
of course closed source companies like ms could violate lots of
copyrights and we'd never know because noone can look at the code....
hmmm...
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