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Those examples you mention exist mainly because interests with money decided it was cheaper to support communal infrastructure upon which they could build propr
by Canada 12y ago
Those examples you mention exist mainly because interests with money decided it was cheaper to support communal infrastructure upon which they could build proprietary offerings. Even if they started for the joy of hacking, a lot of people were paid good money to make those projects what they are today.
That will not automatically happen for a lot of classes of software. You point out that any desktop computing task can be done with free software. So what? That doesn't even matter anymore. It's 2014 and we can't accomplish a significant amount of mobile computing tasks with free software, and those are more intimately connected to us than desktops ever were.
- RadioactiveMan 12y agoThose projects do have a lot of money behind them. The point there is that there is room to make money with open source projects. There are business models besides selling software directly. You make an excellent point about mobile computing. However, interest in free mobile software is growing and we'll see more options available to mirror the demand.
- Canada 12y agoDefinitely. We've certainly seen great examples of open source projects turning into successful commercial ventures, while remaining committed to free software. What I'm trying to say here is that I hope to see even more business models that work well so we can get free alternatives in more areas of computing sooner rather than later.