On Tuesday 10 October 2006 16:50, Dinesh Shah wrote:
Ubuntu should be considered as a business in "Investment Phase", where business invests to create it's market share. I had a long discussion with Mark Shuttleworth on this when he was in India.
It's known as market seeding.
But this in turn indicates, that much of the Free software over the internet are indeed, also, free as in bear, especially Linux distros. Where is the source of money for maintaining mirrors / servers for ISO's of these distros?
Ads. Free resources on commercial servers used to attract potntial customers. So not all are charity.
This is termed as "Donation Economy". However, I am not in favour of such an economy. Such a economy is not sustainable over long period of time.
Absolutely. However in this case the donations are not out of some social guilty but plain business. It costs a lot less to host a server than it does to hire a team of developers / debuggers and a ware house full of hardware.