Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
Hello,
On Sat, 06 Dec 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
A lot of the code that goes into upstream projects these
days (esp the prominent components of the stack which really matter) is
driven by vendors who do it on behalf of the customers which includes
new features and bug fixes. As long as customers get what they want,
they don't really care about the fact that others can get it as well.
The fact that it is free and open source code, makes no real difference
from that perspective.
For example, the following business model[*] could work in some situations.
A hardware vendor contracts a FOSS company to make GNU/Linux "just
work" with their hardare. The FOSS company then makes the patches to
the existing stack available under appropriate FOSS licenses. In some
cases the FOSS company could even work on the Windows stack and give
that code under FOSS licenses. The hardware vendor thus gets a lot of
consumers for the hardware.
One only wishes that more hardware vendors would see it this way. ;)
