OneAndOneIs2

There's an interesting interview with Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, at news.com.

It basically sums up the counter-argument to the ever-popular FUD statement "FOSS is bad, because you can't make money by giving the software away" in one sentence:

When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money.

And also has an important observation that more people in the FOSS world need to hear:

The key is figuring out the difference between one's market and one's community. They are not the same.

Ubuntu, for instance, has a large and thriving community. But they're not really the market. Canonical doesn't expect to make money out of their community: Hell, they even ship Ubuntu CDs to them, free of charge. It costs little and gets them huge amounts of goodwill and publicity. That's what gets them slowly into the corporate space where the market really IS, because what's good enough for somebody to use on their home PC free of charge isn't good enough to be run in a corporate environment without paying for support.

A lot of FOSS enthusiasts turn GPL software into a real "bait and switch" trick - first they say "Use this software, it's free, you can use it and modify it and do as you like, without paying a penny or giving anything back."

Then the company gets big and successful, and suddenly the people who sold the software on "It's free" start to mutter and complain that the company is a parasite, that it's taking code and giving nothing back. Some people even wanted GPL v3 to include conditions that would force code changes to be released even if they weren't distributed - they see Google using Linux to power search, and they mutter that they haven't released the code they use - even though they haven't released the software to anybody and are in total compliance to the letter and the spirit of the GPL.

When it comes to most FOSS projects, there's two distinct targets: The community and the market. They can often be the same, they can also often be different.

It doesn't hurt anybody for a company to take FOSS and give nothing back. It doesn't hurt the market to have a community that gets the software for free. It doesn't hurt the community to have a market that pays for the product.

As Linus said recently, "It doesn't matter if 99.99 percent of all Linux users will never make a single change" - you can't make something from nothing: No matter how many times a company gives back nothing, that "nothing" will never do damage or cost the community anything. So long as there's some people giving back something, whether it's the community giving support or the market giving cash, that's all that matters.