Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 16:17:31 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD direction/Damonnews article Message-ID: <p0510030cb74a8232d675@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <15140.35316.140495.9735@guru.mired.org> References: <20010604200851.A65559@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <3.0.6.32.20010608140211.00ae4470@mail85.pair.com> <3.0.6.32.20010608153126.00f7d7e0@mail85.pair.com> <3B21407C.2B9E8D6D@pitt.edu> <p05100304b749db542efa@[194.78.241.123]> <15140.35316.140495.9735@guru.mired.org>
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At 4:05 AM -0500 6/11/01, Mike Meyer wrote: > While I agree that that model can work, your description is missing > one important detail - where's the corporate income coming from after > they open-source the product? A primary source of income would be consulting, training, and telephone support. I would add a fourth source of income through the provision of commercial services related to the product in question. > Do you have examples of companies that follow this basic model with a > different income source? Sendmail is doing the first three, but Nominum is doing all four. I think that setting up as many additional sources of income, from as broad a community as possible, is vital to the future health of the company. > The other open source model that have evidence of a actually working > is bundling open-sourced software with proprietary hardware. There's > little or no money in the open-sourced software, but development and > maintenance gets covered by the costs affiliated with the > hardware. Tivo is doing this. It's not clear they are going to survive > the arrival of MicroSoft as competition, but their basic model seems > to be working fine. Problem is, TiVO is taking a loss on each box they sell, and then making it up on the service side (the lifetime subscriptions). As a customer, I don't want to continue to pay $19.95 for the rest of my life, so I'd be much happier taking the Philips DVR, whereby you buy the hardware outright (at a higher price), but then the channel information is made available at no cost. Also, a TiVO is useless outside the country where it is sold, because the telephone number that the box is programmed to dial is hard-coded. A Philips DVR can be used in any country, because it does not depend on being able to dial up a particular telephone number to get the necessary information. -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> /* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net> */ /* Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody */ /* Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers */ /* */ /* Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob */ /* where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key */ dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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