On Friday 19 September 2003 00:00, Varun(Red Hat Certified) wrote:
It's not often that Bill Gates is associated with the free Linux computer operating system, Netscape's Web browser or royalty-free software, but on Wednesday he embraced all three.
Everybody has to. Trying to make money by preventing people from using their intelect (patent blocks) or by preventing the use / creation of tools they have legitimately purchased is not going to work. A point made by Dr. Nagarjuna at the last meet was that it is not possible to sell something that is non-expendible. Stuff like software, music, literature, fall in this category. Until a few years ago the means to produce and distribute stuff like this required huge capital. Computers have eliminated the capital bottleneck. It is no longer neccessary to have large capital to produce, reproduce and distribute stuff like the above. The bottleneck is only the intellectual process. In case of software the GNU system of collaborative creation very effectively eliminates this bottleneck too. Incase of music and literature collaboration may not always produce better results. For those of us making a living in the computing industry, a deep rethink of business models is on the cards.