[CLUE-Tech] GPL loopholes

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 15:36, Angelo Bertolli wrote:

*snip*

> But in the end I think people have realized that since MS runs something 
> like 90% of the desktop market, that merely having more people use linux 
> contributes to the community. 

This is true to an extent... but every user also takes a bit from the
available resources of the community as well. The code itself is never
depleted, everyone in the world can have a copy of Red Hat Linux and it
won't be used up... but that's only part of the picture. 

For example, every user that decides to download Red Hat Linux, they're
dipping into the available pool of bandwidth -- if 1,000 new users come
onboard every week for Red Hat, just as an example, you start to have a
pretty hefty drain on bandwidth for package updates, new releases and so
forth. If too few of those people are bucking up money to Red Hat, the
bandwidth costs start to become prohibitive. Even with a system of
mirrors, large number of users start to put a serious drain on available
resources for the entire community. 

Then you have the ratio of users asking questions to users who answer
them. Too many new users asking questions (particularly those that have
already been answered before...) and the experienced users start to get
tired of answering newbie questions and stop replying... if other users
don't step up to help support the new folks, the system breaks down. 

The same is also true of developer talent. I don't know what the
attrition rate for open source developers is, but I know that it's not
uncommon for some developers to get tired of a project or to have to
quit working on something due to changed employment circumstances and so
forth... and a lot of development for the kernel and projects like
Apache, Sendmail, Postfix, KDE, etc. comes from people who do some or
all of that work with the blessing of a full-time employer. A lot of
Larry Wall's work with Perl, for example, was funded by O'Reilly and
then by the Perl Foundation (if I'm not mistaken) -- that money has to
come from somewhere... 

In short, new users are a boon to Linux, and far be it from me to turn
away a new user -- but we'll need a certain percentage of those folks to
contribute financially and/or by helping in other ways, or the ecosystem
will break down. Mere use is only a minimal contribution at best. Just
having a large user-base won't be of much use if that user-base takes
without contribution... 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net