<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>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.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br>Dear Keraleean,<br><br>Are you suggesting that private company / ownership is a bad thing in itself? AFAIK, the Free Software stands for property rights. <font color="#000000"><br><br>"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." - </font><font color="#ffffff"><a href="mailto:johnnyb@wolfram.com"><span class="sub">Jonathan Bartlett </span></a></font></div></div><br clear="all">And what is bad in a private company?<br>
<br>Canonical is a private company. Red Hat is a private company. Many private companies are already having sustainable business models built on FS. <br><br>For instance,<font color="#000000"><br><br></font><font color="#000000">* Perl is supported by the publisher who makes money from Perl books.
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* GCC and the Win32 port of many GNU tools is supported by Cygnus/RedHat who sell support/consulting services
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* Various open source initiatives have been supported by Sun make their OS more standard/enhanced.
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* Apache has been supported by IBM, Sun, and others for their own reasons
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These business models have been around for *years* and they show no signs of disappearing anytime soon.
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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.</font> - <font color="#ffffff"><a href="mailto:awang@nospam.com"><span class="sub">Anil Wang </span></a></font><br><font color="#000000"><br>I have copy pasted both quotes from the comments of an early <a href="http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-05-16-012-20-OP&tbovrmode=3#talkback_area">Linux Today article</a>. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>-Sebin<br><br><br></font>-- <br>...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)<br>