rohitj's domain » Windows http://rohitj.net Yet more clitches Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:03:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Can there be a good business model for open source guys? http://rohitj.net/blog/2007/12/03/can-there-be-a-good-business-model-for-open-source-guys/ http://rohitj.net/blog/2007/12/03/can-there-be-a-good-business-model-for-open-source-guys/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:44:37 +0000 admin http://www.rohitj.net/blog/2007/12/03/can-there-be-a-good-business-model-for-open-source-guys/ 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.

]]> http://rohitj.net/blog/2007/12/03/can-there-be-a-good-business-model-for-open-source-guys/feed/ 7 Strange! http://rohitj.net/blog/2007/10/14/strange/ http://rohitj.net/blog/2007/10/14/strange/#comments Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:10:41 +0000 rohitj http://www.rohitj.net/blog/2007/10/14/strange/ So, I was out for the weekend. When I came back I saw my phpMyVisites and found this statistics for the week :

Strange

Isn’t it strange?

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