[Fsf-friends] Re: Fsf-friends Digest, Vol 33, Issue 7

[Harish Narayanan]

Mishi Choudhary wrote:

>hello everyone
>since i am new to all this and allof you seem to be pros can u please spare sometime to answer certain questions i have .i'll look forward to hearing from you all
>  
>
I am going to be very brief.

>can you please explain the economic viability of using free software?
>how are the  developers of free software adequately compensated?
>  
>
Those two are related questions.

Functional business models around Free software mostly follow a path
that involves releasing the software Free (as in freedom and price), and
then charging the users for support or services around the core
software. Often times, since people need customised variants of software
to suit their specific needs, they can (and do) pay developers to work
on modifying Free software to suit these requirements. This way, they
get what they want without having to build things from scratch, and the
software itself benefits as these improvements work their way back into
the parent projects.

>how big is free software in comparison to proprietary software?
>  
>
It differs based on what areas you're looking at. At the core levels
(the sorts of thing that drive the web: Apache, sendmail, ...), Free
software is huge; much bigger than proprietary software. This is also
quite true in realms such as high performance scientific computing in
research at large universities (where distributions of GNU/Linux, gcc,
Free numerical libraries rule the roost). If you were asking about the
"desktop space", its installation base is much much smaller than
proprietary software, like Windows. But I would be willing to wager it
is in the order of magnitude of popularity as Mac OS X.

Harish