| OF COURSE there's a profit motive. Who said there wasn't?
I didn't say there was no profit motive in developing OSS, I said there's no DIRECT profit motive: you can't make money JUST developing OSS. You make money doing other things and OSS helps you by providing good, inexpensive software.
As for who develops it to begin with? Most OSS projects start as a small project that someone needs for a specific need. For example, Samba started as a graduate student's need to connect a bunch of Windows machines to a Linux server. He sniffed some packets, reverse engineered the SMB protocol (which would get him arrested today, but I digress) and wrote a process to serve that protocol. Then, once having written the software, he released it OSS because a) that got him free bug checking from other developers b) it helped build his professional reputation and c) it was fun.
Urgh, I HATE being called idealistic. OSS is already wildly popular. That's not idealism, that's simple fact. Good grief, I was a business major and I did the dot.com thing. Of COURSE I'm a capitalist.
SnappingTurtle takes a chill pill Ahhhhh... |
