[Fsf-friends] Comrades’ new-found love with IT

[Sebin Jacob]

>
> I do not know who used the logo of FSF-India. However I too feel that for
> the cause of free software they should not have used logo of a private
> company which does not even have a democratic structure.
>

Dear Keraleean,

Are you suggesting that private company / ownership is a bad thing in
itself? AFAIK, the Free Software stands for property rights.

"Some people think free software goes against the principal of property
ownership. However, if I buy a CD at the store, intellectual property says I
don't have ownership rights of a CD. If I did, I could do anything with it I
wanted to. Without the bizarre intellectual property game, I own what I
buy." - Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb at wolfram.com>

And what is bad in a private company?

Canonical is a private company. Red Hat is a private company. Many private
companies are already having sustainable business models built on FS.

For instance,

* Perl is supported by the publisher who makes money from Perl books.
* GCC and the Win32 port of many GNU tools is supported by Cygnus/RedHat who
sell support/consulting services
* Various open source initiatives have been supported by Sun make their OS
more standard/enhanced.
* Apache has been supported by IBM, Sun, and others for their own reasons

These business models have been around for *years* and they show no signs of
disappearing anytime soon.

One business model that's often overlooked isn't really a business model.
Companies that depends on software that they don't want to specialize in
creating (e.g. a software company that doesn't want to create a custom
installation package) will often contribute to an existing open source
project that specializes in that area (e.g. RPM) because it saves them the
money and resources it develop an inhouse solution. They contribute to the
main stream of development because the don't want to keep patching their
software against the new versions or because they want those features to be
a defacto standard. - Anil Wang <awang at nospam.com>

I have copy pasted both quotes from the comments of an early Linux Today
article<http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-05-16-012-20-OP&tbovrmode=3#talkback_area>.


Maybe, these arguments seem slightly away from your opposition. But what I
was trying to say was, even if FSFI is a private company, they cannot be
blamed for that.India's vote against OOXML in favor of ODF as ISO standard
was made possible becouse of FSFI. If FSFI had a democratically elected
organisational setup, the chapters like FSF Chennai would have been
mushroomed overnight and it would have been hijacked by vested interest
groups - let alone CPI(M). We have known such things in co-operative society
/ bank elections, here in Kerala for quite a long time.

-Sebin


-- 
...if I fought with you, if i fell wounded and allowed no one to learn of my
suffering, if I never turned my back to the enemy: Give me your blessing!
(Nikos Kazantzakis)
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