On 29 Jun, 19:06, "Capt. James Pike" <j...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> IBM would not do such a thing. IBM owns more patents than Microsoft and if
> patents were abolished/overhauled then IBM stands to lose more. Don't fool
> yourself because it IS about the money. IBM is a business not a good will
> organization. They will always do what's in the best financial interest of
> IBM and this means keeping the patent system in its current state.
That's the problem with business... too many businessmen...
What's needed is a good old-fashioned philanthropist, with pockets
deeper than the whatsit trench, who doesn't mind spending oodles of
cash just to achieve something good.
A little beside the point: but I remember reading an interview with
Mark Shuttleworth not long after he'd got Ubuntu going. He was saying
how he'd made more money than he'd ever be able to spend, and now
wanted to use it to create a real, good open-source, open-standards
OS. So he got the ball rolling in the creation of Ubuntu, he had no
profit motive, he made promises to always make the OS available free -
through download, and through that shipit thing he's got going. In
the interview he actually said he didn't care if the project didn't
make him money, he was happy to finance it out of his own pocket, he
wanted good, open, free software to be available all over the world,
including places like Africa, the less developed nations in Asia,
where the telecommunications infrastructure made downloading
unfeasible (hence shipit) and so forth...
But business, money, the profit motive, always seems to rear its
head. Canonical is a business, it has to make a profit to keep its
shareholders or whatever happy - luckily it's doing this by providing
support services, but there's always the awful possibility that they
might have to start charging for Ubuntu some time in the future. And
there are always the cynics who claim that Shuttleworth's
philanthropic stance is a crock - that as a canny businessman he's
always had his eye on the main chance and /of course/ he's going to
start charging for a premium version of Ubuntu, only letting the
paupers of the world have a crippleware version gratis.
Me, I've got faith in Shuttleworth's sincerity. But even if I'm
right, there are damn few Mark Shuttleworths in the software
business. Most companies are going to do whatever is best for the
bottom line. Unfortunately.
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