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

hi ..mishi, "open source" software, and is distributed under the GPL (GNU General Public License), this is the difference from other major systems. Open source can provide your application : speed, reliability, performance, portability and affordability....An example is the killer application [Apache], just check out the market share for the Apache web server at http://news.netcraft.com/...also do just check out A case study in open source business for Trolltech at http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/10/03/155235 this is just an example which tells how Trolltech is obviously a successful company.

Thanks, Shibu C V ---

On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:40:39 +0530, Mishi Choudhary mishi_c@rediffmail.com 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 can you please explain the economic viability of using free software? how are the developers of free software adequately compensated? how big is free software in comparison to proprietary software?

Warm Regards Mishi Choudhary _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends@mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends

can you please explain the economic viability of using free software?

I am a bit confused by the question. Is the question about "viabilty of USING free software" or should it read "viability of free software"? I am assuming the later and answering.

Free Software has existed for more than 20 years now, and has gotten bigger every year passing year, so it is obviously viable. Whether current economic theories can explain its existence (let alone viabilty) is another problem entirely, a problem for economists not for the free software community.

how are the developers of free software adequately compensated?

For a long time in the history of humankind, we have been producers and gatherers of whatever we needed with little specialization. During those times we did not need to ask how will a hunter or gatherer be adequately compensated. They hunted or gathered what they needed, therefore there was no need for compensation.

Likewise Free Software developers will produce what they need for themselves, it just so happens that the rest of soceity also benefits. Also Free Software developers will develop whatever we pay them to develop, just like everybody else.

how big is free software in comparison to proprietary software?

It has been estimated thatsourceforge alone is equal to 1 Microsoft.

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