Comments on Thondom Raughts: Making money with Free Software

Great article Sir.. I would request you to please...

2009-08-17T20:26:00.978+05:30

Great article Sir..

I would request you to please have a look and suggest/comment on the articles I wrote on Open Source Software and India:

http://pratikpoddarcse.blogspot.com/2009/08/open-source-is-must-for-india.html

http://pratikpoddarcse.blogspot.com/2009/08/india-and-open-source-software-part-2.html

@pravi - I have made the changes@Ashik S - I have ...

2009-03-18T14:55:00.000+05:30

@pravi - I have made the changes
@Ashik S - I have made the changes Thanks for the suggestions :)
@technikhil - Thanks for the links. The second link is pretty old. I am sure there are much larger number of companies and much bigger ones.

This link has a list of open source based busines...

2009-03-18T14:19:00.000+05:30

This link has a list of open source based business.

IMHO it would be better to put it this way: First ...

2009-03-05T15:05:00.000+05:30

IMHO it would be better to put it this way:

First there was the community of developers/hackers who shared everything freely. Copying software cost near to nothing and thus it was easy for everyone to share share things. Everyone wanted to . That is how good science grows. Hardware companies distributed accompanying software and they were glad that people were making and sharing software that made their hardware useful. But as time went by, commercial companies began to enter the market.

Theses companies required hackers to sign what is known as an NDA. This prevented people from sharing knowledge. This is akin to someone paying you money and telling you that "Look , you know that 2+2=4, but i am going to sell that public knowledge to people. In order for that, you need to shut up. I will make your life comfortable in return". Money is needed for people to live comfortably, and when someone pays you money for something that makes seemingly makes good sense, people join in. Thus, without realizing what was happening on a larger scale, hackers in these commercial software companies signed such NDAs and fragmentation of the community resulted. Software was no longer free. That freedom was taken away. Now someone could control the outflow of knowledge, and that meant money even though it was ethically wrong.

-- From Arun M's talk at CET on March 1

It covers the money making aspects nicely.Just one...

2009-03-05T11:55:00.000+05:30

It covers the money making aspects nicely.

Just one question. THere was no explicit mention of the politics involved in
free software. IMO that is also essential, because it is the prime reason for
which Free Software came into existance. Even though the historical ground is
covered in any number of articles out there on the web, a mention of how all
this came about would be nice. :)

Regards
Ashik S

Towards your point regarding the value placed on o...

2009-03-05T10:02:00.000+05:30

Towards your point regarding the value placed on open-source developers in top companies - check this out - link
This guy is so confident - he is actually blogging about an offer from Microsoft before the offer is made :-)

Anoop,Its very good and detailed article. Just som...

2009-03-05T05:33:00.000+05:30

Anoop,

Its very good and detailed article. Just some comments.

QT has changed its licensing strategy by adding LGPL to the licensing options in addition to its proprietary and GPL licenses from 4.5.0. Now with LGPL version you can use QT for creating proprietary applications, which is not possible with GPL.
It would be better to expand USP (unique selling point).

Since it is targeted for a student audience, I suggest including information about Google Summer of Code.