On Fri, 19 Apr 2002 23:41:09 aaaaarrrgghhh wrote:

If i'm a company like Infosys/SAP, then I'm designing software to make companies more productive..

There's a catch here - you've got to distinguish between products and services. A Word Processor is a software that can be used by n number of people without any changes done to the underlying source. OTOH, what Infosys/SAP would do is develop systems that apply to one specific customer and using the same techniques in another environment would again involve a lot of analysis and what-have-you for deployment.

There are two pieces to this solution now - the Concept and the Software. You can't keep the Concept under wraps. The SEs at the client location have to know how your system works. The Software may be closed source but it won't make much of a difference if another party lifted your Software and Concept and tried to deploy it at another location because the analysis will have to be redone, the implementation will have to be redesigned to fit the other client and the software itself will have to be tweaked.

Infosys charges according to man-hours spent on a project. Anyone who has been thru a complete development cycle knows that analysis, design, maintenance and support take far more man-hours than coding. So if I'm a Free Software counterpart of Infosys, I still earn a lot for my man-hours in other aspects.

Where products are concerned, I follow the concept of one contributor to Free Software (regretfully, I forgot his name) - it makes a lot of economic sense to me if I give one app away in exchange of an entire OS and so many more apps for free. Perhaps, now you'd understand Philip's concept of "Cost per User".

--- Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST) http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~tahir tahir AT ncst DOT ernet DOT in __________________________________ We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed

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