It should be Linux news week, with this week's trade show in New York attracting the heavy hitters. CNet has a preview that includes some interesting info. One is some costing from Aberdeen analyst Bill Claybrook, who says: "If Red Hat Advanced Server is part of a deal with Oracle (9i database software) on a cluster of four Dell machines, each of which has four CPUs, Oracle gets $60,000 a CPU, or $960,000, Dell gets $150,000 or so for the hardware, and Red Hat will get $10,000." Now you know, if you didn't already, how Oracle boss Larry Ellison can afford to give blondes cars as a chat up line. $1 million for a bit of software? Well, if that sounds a lot compared to a copy of Windows, you haven't shopped with IBM.....
There's also a nice line from open source co-founder Bruce Perens about the lust for money among companies in the Linux industry. "Chasing after the pot of gold is drawing people pretty far away from the community spirit," he says. Well, Bruce, the whole point of open source was to be business friendly, remember? Before you and Eric Raymond broke away, the whole "open source" business was actually called the free software movement, as promoted by Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. At least calling it "free software" ensured that no one really expected to get rich from it.
In fact, the whole point of "free software" was to foster a community spirit. So, today, there's nothing surprising about that community spirit being exploited, abused and lost in the switch from "free" to "open source". It's exactly what a rational person (well, me) would (and did) expect to happen. The fact that the Perens/Raymond et al Open Source Definiton is virtually identical to the definiton of free software hardly offers any protection because most people don't have a clue what "open source" actually means. Most of them just think it means you can read the source....
