Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Fri Nov 25 12:43:10 CST 2011
That is correct. One of Microsoft's very reliable revenue streams is product support. ;-) A company may need a piece of software to run their business and they will just hire a software developer to add some enhancements for their purposes and then hire an integrator to assemble a group of packages. They will of course know any improvements dealing directly with the core will have to be added back to the license but they will have a complete set of source code at the end, which is an ultimate form of business security. All these transactions of course make money, the software continues to evolve and improve at a much more rapid pace than proprietary designed products. (You only have to look at how long IE6 languished and how fast such products like FF evolved. To MS's credit, they have worked very hard to keep pace but do not have the number of programmers and they are just viewing the support of IE as nothing more than the cost of doing business.) The business is more like a code rental where the renters are encouraged to make improvements, than a product purchase, so the renters are no longer stuck to the whims of a proprietary system and continuous licensing fees. I for one, have probably spent a lot of money on donating to various Open Source products, 10, 25 and sometimes a hundred, over the years. If I like the software, I like to encourage it. To add a political note; Open Source software can be viewed as a blend of socialized software and free-enterprise, both in their purest forms. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Mark Simms Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 9:35 AM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] Clearing the decks for MySQL Wow, let get this crazy GPL stuff straight: Oracle can take the MariaDB enhancements and either incorporate them into their version and give them away OR.... It can even sell them ? Again, I guess I really must understand that in the open source software business, the money is no longer in the code, but in the SUPPORT and MAINTENANCE agreement, correct ? -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com