Re: Charging the Charger [was: GPL v3 public performance idea?]

On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 17:06 -0400, Marshall W. Van Alstyne wrote:
> Yes, delays to bug fixes are significant.  I think access to the source is 
> important for this reason. [...]

When you said of in-house "This doesn't scale nearly as well as 
selling packaged solutions", it can be reversed, what big IT consumers
(those who spend 90% of the money that goes in programmer pockets) want
is high quality support and customization, and "packaged solutions"
doesn't "scale" at all here since government granted monopolies provide
a disincentive to do so.

> [...] I'll concede that Gates too often uses the invisible hand of the market to 
> pick consumers' pockets, but even so, he must have done something 
> right.  Market shares of Word, Excel, PPT, and Windows are remarkably high...

Well two big antitrust bodies said that Microsoft behaviour was
illegal abuse of monopoly power, so I won't go further.

> [...] As a rule, I find it really hard to find an economic justification for 
> software patents.  [...]

IP lawyers do have a justification :)

Laurent