On Wednesday 28 December 2005 16:19, Dinesh Shah wrote:
Hi Terrence,
On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 15:02, JTD wrote:
I don't agree with the above reasoning. If any technology, however superior, can not reach the people, I would consider it useless and worthless.
Partly true or false - it depends what point in time u make the observation and what is your definition of "value and worthiness".
The point I am trying to make is to make available the technology to people in most efficient method available to you with prevailing market conditions.
Business is about markets. Technology is about pushing the engineering and scientific frontier. Irrespective of it's use or misuse. Science and tech will reach (mass) use when several existing mechanisms relevant to business (and thoroughly irrelevant to sc & tech) learn to deliver those. It's not the scientist or technologist job to create value for business.
That includes even using "Middle Man" for delivery and choosing the correct delivery model. In '70s and '80s WalMart was the right delivery vehicle. In '90s and new millenia it's Amazone and eBay. :-)
I am not berating middle men (a very essential and important component in any society) but pointing out it's irrelevance to technology.
Remember technology is for the benefit of mankind not the other way round. It is really sad that many people just talk of technology for technology's sack.
like the MIT lab where personal computing started? Or some pokey place with two college kids making apples from ICs? or a few developers writing the next revolution?
Even though Apple was great technology, IBM PC and Microsoft took the market. Why? Because, despite many problems, people show value in buying PC over MAC.
So does that make the MAC useless. And M$ took market by innumerable illegal business practices and continue to do so, rather than any inherent value in it's product. Practices like forcing Hitachi to remove BeOS from any machine with windows. If anything M$ software continue to be far more useless than ever before. Of course one may continue to pull wool on customers, choosing to ignore everything else in return for money like the M$ peddlers do or one may choose to enlighten the customer and work hard to provide a lasting solution and make more money in the long run.
People don't buy technology for the sack of technology, they buy the technology for the immediate and future benefit he will get out of his investment in technology.
The idea behind FOSS is to make technology available and accessible FREELY to people. The attitude of some people in FOSS, technology for the technology's sack, is hurting the FOSS, apart from many other reasons.
I think not. Since it is foss those feeling hurt can pick the code and fork it with pleasure - X.org, uclinux, rtlinux. As long as the technology is FOSS someone can always pick up broken threads and weave it into a useful blanket.
This is 100% correct. Also, success of FOSS will not be derived from FREEDOM alone. People has to see the "value" in the FREEDOM available to them in FOSS. More over FOSS has to solve the real life problems for large scale adoption. And the real problem solving is done by those "Middle Man" like RedHat, Novell/SuSE, Debian, IBM, Terrence etc... :-)
Well, by what other tangible means can you attach/access "value" to "products" and/or "services"?
Customer satisfaction. Me having fun. Engineers feeling happy. Do these translate to monetory value? maybe but it is not going to reflect on my business in a very very long time.
Gandhi was able to show great "value" in Khadi and "Swadeshi". Can FOSS do the same?
In short as long as there is freedom all the contradictory forces will resolve them selves over time. Skew it with legislation like DRM or patent laws in the guise of helping the inventor and u get screwed.
Not really, people does not attach to much importance to freedom. See what is the status of Khadi and "Swadeshi" in India today?
That is precisely why it is of such great importance and essential that those who know this keep reminding others. All other values are really only beneficial side effects of this.