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Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone. Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in s
by hpcjoe 8y ago
Apologies in advance if this triggers anyone.
Way back when I was starting as a systems engineer at one of them-thar unix workstation companies, my mentor in sales laid down a bit of learning on me.
He said "anything you give away for free has no value." His context was that here we are selling big expensive hardware, and while the software is cheap, it wasn't free. I wanted it to be free so as to lower barriers to use the systems. I wanted dev environments to be free, and pay for support if you need it. Again, to increase usage.
You can see similar concepts in what companies decide has no value, by what they are willing to bundle for "free". Cell phone plans in the use are doing 2-for-1 deals of some sort. The carriers believe their services have value, and the phones are merely a means to deliver their value.
OTOH, the cell phone vendors believe their devices are the value, and try to give away software they think will make their devices look better.
Yeah, I know, you pay for it in the end. Costs are always borne by the customers.
Amazon is leveraging its market dominance in ways that are hard to view other than as anti-competitive. I do suspect that eventually, they will be held to task for that. But that they will likely keep operating in that manner for as long as possible.
Azure, with its shared success model, may actually manage to convince OSS projects to work more closely with them. It would not surprise me in the least to see licenses rewritten to be friendly to the shared success model, and hostile to the do whatever it is you want model.
- neilv 8y agoIf that Unix workstation vendor was Sun, at one point, everyone got a bundled K&R C compiler (possibly bundled for building custom kernels), and optionally paid extra for the ANSI C compiler, and then C++ compiler. Which worked for a while. You either didn't need the extra tools (portable code was a subset of K&R anyway), or you had ample money to pay for extra tools. (Research&education appreciated that the majority of GNU and other open source software favored Sun's bundled compiler, over other workstation platforms. Though there was some brief upset when a competing workstation line would leapfrog performance briefly (e.g., HP 9000/7xx, IBM RS/6000). And the commercial workstation independent software vendors sold such high-ticket software (e.g., 5 figures per seat, plus support contracts and training), and were already dropping huge money on engineers and hardware, so paying for software tools was a relatively small additional expense. The ISV might also go pay others for seats of third-party tools for developers, like Saber-C, Purify, FrameMaker, Interleaf, and niche developer software like EDA or CASE.) Meanwhile, GCC was starting to get as credible on some hosts/targets as the workstation vendor compilers (vendor C++ compilers sometimes had bugs). Before that finished playing out, I moved from workstations (I worked on almost all of them, plus the Cray S-MP) and sometimes Windows NT, to move fully to GNU/Linux on mostly PC hardware. (Edit: I got access to these toys as a super-nerdy kid. I'm well aware that HR screeners shred the resume of anyone who was paying attention when the Web boom started. :)
- donmcronald 8y agoCan you give more info on the shared success model thing? I’ve never heard of it. What kinds of differences in licensing are there? Oracle closing up “Open” Solaris was a real eye opener for me and I find the licensing / business politics of open source to be fairly interesting.