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I have been thinking about business models for open source softwares. Though I couldn’t come up with proper answer. Lets see, let me try to start with different software people make and use.

Office : No doubt it needs very big amount of work. And if someone puts this much effort to make an Office package, why will he give it away for free? Of course not, it doesn’t make sense. Probably thats the reason why we do not have any open-source Office software. And surely Microsoft Office is way too good. OOo is dumped for long time now.

Matlab, Visual Studio etc : Again it requires big amount of investment and hard work. No reason one should give it away for free. Though yeah Eclipse is there. And I must say that it is very good. But isn’t it a way in which IBM is earning publicity? And isn’t it same with netbeans as well.

Computer Games : Again too much work and proficiency.

Operating System : Again, do you think open source can help make an Operating System any better? Oh yeah, bug fixing.. probably yes, but without incentive why will someone do quality work? Every second day one thing or another is broken. But yeah surely, like Redhat is doing, good things are possible with it, specially for server side technologies.

Other Desktop Applications :  Amarok, they are fighting to get funds… Is there any good voice chat client? Ekiga? does support proxy. Skype? no more an open source project. Gaim? not yet. Now don’t say that they are fighting in reverse engineering and other bullshit. Firefox? don’t you know that people start with Firefox but do not stick to it for long time. Thats a popular observation, isn’t it. Evolution? I wish they come up with something good. Though I guess they are also having problems (because of open source nature? I guess yes.)

I am not saying that open source is right or wrong. But at the end of the day, what a user wants is good software, softwares in which he need not be a geek to solve the problem. And surely as of now, I do not see open source work to give any good  reply to this need. You may say that Gutsy is a solution, or fedora 8 is awesome, and these distros solves most of the problems. But don’t you think you have been giving these arguments for last 20 years? When fedora 5 came, everyone said the same. When fedora 6 came same. And same goes with Ubuntu.

So, these guys they have collected some logos of some free softwares. Checkout http://raro.oreto.inf-cr.uclm.es/apps/stickers/ . It’s a cool collection. Right now, on my laptop I have got 5 stickers.

1. Some warning label.
2. Laptop Hardware Config.
3. Graphics by ATI
4. Intel Inside
5. Designed for MS Windows XP

Of course the fifth one makes my laptop look dirty. . I want to remove it, but I am afraid my laptop’s beauty will go down with the mark that this sticker will leave. But these guys have given ‘us’ a solution. We plan to get these stickers printed. And then we will be able to remove the existing stickers and place these free software stickers on  the same place. It will be so cool.

Those who want such stickers, leave a comment here. And wait for some time. ( Search for a press is going)

This is the first time when I could read and write in hindi on my machine. This is how it works in Fedora :

1. Install fonts-hindi : yum install fonts-hindi
2. Install the greasespot plugin : Go to the site http://www.greasespot.net/ and click on the “install greasespot” link, it will install this plugin.
3. restart firefox.

And you are done
अब आराम से हिन्दी मे लिखें।

Update : If you want to write in hindi you may be interested in this link www.rohitj.net/indic

So, most of you must be knowing about the “The quick brown Fox Jumps over the lazy dog” bug. There is another real cool hack in Windows. So, if there is a guest account in your friends computer, open the guest account and open command prompt. Then in command prompt write “net user <username> <passwd>”, it will change the <username> password to the <passwd> you give it. Such a simple thing. Isn’t it?

Now here is another thing. 1 line of code can crach IE6. The line is :

<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>

You can find the original post here : http://immike.net/blog/2007/08/06/single-line-of-html-crashes-ie-6/
Happy IEing