Mediaboss Marketing

You know who maddog is, right? He's one of our favorite speakers on what we might call the Linux/FOSS circuit. So you know, despite the Noel Coward song that says, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun," Jon prefers shade much of the time when he's in a tropical climate, based on personal observations at Linux conferences in Florida and Hawaii. But sun or shade, maddog is an eloquent and interesting speaker. We'd like to take you all to hear him in person, but we can't, so this video is the next best thing. (Alternate Video Link)

Timothy Lord:Jon, you talked today here at the Northwest LinuxFest in part about the future of free software.One thing you mentioned and I want to ask you to expand on:What is the connection between the drop in price of hardware and free software?

Jon maddog Hall:Well when hardware used to cost tens of thousands of dollars, a lot of times the vendor would blend the software directly into the hardware cost, and you didnt see the price of the software.As the price of the hardware continues to drop, the price of the software can tend to become overwhelming as to what the price of the total system is.And so people start looking around and saying, Oh well, maybe I can getthey start seeing this cost.It is the same type of thing with people who get caught with what they call a Microsoft tax of buying a Notebook with the $34 or $35 to $70 type Microsoft charges for an operating system.When the Notebooks were thousands of dollars, that price was a little hidden.But now as they drop down to $400 or less, people become more aware of it.So this is one of the issues.The second issue is when people start having the ability to create embedded systems, where they are not just buying one operatinglicense but they are buying the license thousands of times, all of a sudden, we were only buying one or two licenses, it is one thing, but when you are buying thousands of licenses a $35 license may be $35,000.

Tim:In connecting the worlds of open and closed software, one of the things that you mentioned is that you think that even closed source projects would be able to hire open source people. Can you talk about that?What do you mean by that?

Jon:Well, lets say I am developing a project of some type and I intend selling it as closed source.If I hire a closed source programmer, somebody who has only worked in the closed source world, they really may not have looked out to see what types of software is available.They may not understand free software licenses, the fact that different licenses have different requirements.They may not have worked in a distributed, collaborative environment before.But if you hire somebody who has been a free software developer, who has paid attention to all of those things, they can oftentimes say, Well, instead of you having to buy this database to make the project, you could use this open source database and not to have to pay the database company a lot of money to buy the database for this solution. And theres really no reason not to use an open source developer for a closed source project as long as that person realizes that actual project is going to be closed source and their understanding of that, when they go into the project.So I see the downside of hiring an open source programmer and as I said, everything else being equal, the difference between hiring an open source programmer and a closed source programmer to me makes a lot of sense to hire the open source.

Tim:One thing I have been picking for a lot of years is that Microsoft could become the worlds biggest open source vendor.It is just not their model right now.

Jon:Well, I have given a lot of thought to this.Clearly, of course, I dont work in Microsoft so I dont know what their thinking is but they have a business model based upon a product.And they have a channel of people who buy their products and sell their products to customers.Their channel makes money off of that.And if Microsoft were to start giving away their products for free, that channel would not be able to make as much money.So that channel would be very upset with Microsoft, just like the channel was upset with Microsoft when Microsoft started selling the Microsoft Office functionality in the cloud.It kind of cut the channel out from thatthe channel was upset.The same type of thing happened with SCO UNIX when SCO was a company that was selling Linux Box, they had a whole bunch of OEMs and channels and VARs and things like that, that made money selling the product.And when Caldera bought SCO they said, Oh heres Linux, and Linux is for free and basically cut out this.And Caldera thought they were getting this huge channel group of VARs and OEMs and when they actually started_____ 5:02 the channel disappeared.

Tim:They walked into that.

Jon:Yes, they did.

Tim:In the world of closed versus open too, when it comes to open source software, one thing you mentioned is that, people complain sometimes that there are a lot of stagnant projects.You dont seem concerned about that. Can you say why that is?

Original post:
Jon 'maddog' Hall On the Future of Free Software (Video)