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It bothers me that this is a War-and-Peace epic that makes it difficult to find the various models in a digestible form. Many have told me how good life will be

It bothers me that this is a War-and-Peace epic that makes it difficult to find the various models in a digestible form. Many have told me how good life will be if I charge for support of an open source app. And yet no one compares that with support revenue PLUS unit sales of software. I don't want to be in the support business (acknowledging that some support is always required, paid for or not). I want to be in the software business. The security argument for open source no longer holds any credence with me, because under standard assumptions, open source and proprietary software is security equivalent in the sense that opening up the code helps both the attacker and defender equally - http://idei.fr/activity.php?r=1898 http://idei.fr/activity.php?r=1898 - Ross Anderson, "Security in Open versus Closed Systems - The Dance of Boltzmann, Coase and Moore".

dj-wonk 12y ago
I think saying "equally" misses a key point: it depends on the abilities and numbers of the attackers and the defenders.
- rwallace 12y ago
  There is also the consideration that in practice, attackers are far more likely than defenders to be willing to reverse engineer a binary.
rwallace 12y ago
> I don't want to be in the support business (acknowledging that some support is always required, paid for or not). I want to be in the software business. A problem with this is that the pure software business doesn't exist anymore. It was a temporary historical phenomenon, centered around the 1980s, but nowadays people simply are not offering to pay money just for a disk with a program on it. (The few major exceptions are grandfathered in by network effects. If Microsoft Word were released today, nobody would buy it.) People are still offering to pay money to have their problems solved; as you acknowledge yourself, this is a bullet you inevitably have to bite. You can think of this as having to be in the support business because that's what people are willing to pay for, or you can think of some other slant on it, but that's where you have to go because that's where the money is. Or as one writer put it more succinctly: Software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.

dj-wonk 12y ago

I think saying "equally" misses a key point: it depends on the abilities and numbers of the attackers and the defenders.

rwallace 12y ago
There is also the consideration that in practice, attackers are far more likely than defenders to be willing to reverse engineer a binary.

rwallace 12y ago

> I don't want to be in the support business (acknowledging that some support is always required, paid for or not). I want to be in the software business. A problem with this is that the pure software business doesn't exist anymore. It was a temporary historical phenomenon, centered around the 1980s, but nowadays people simply are not offering to pay money just for a disk with a program on it. (The few major exceptions are grandfathered in by network effects. If Microsoft Word were released today, nobody would buy it.) People are still offering to pay money to have their problems solved; as you acknowledge yourself, this is a bullet you inevitably have to bite. You can think of this as having to be in the support business because that's what people are willing to pay for, or you can think of some other slant on it, but that's where you have to go because that's where the money is. Or as one writer put it more succinctly: Software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.