On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 09:12, Tony Leotta wrote: > Pillar Software has to pay Microsoft tens of thousands of dollars in the > form of software licenses. Because we actually pay Microsoft to use > their software...rather than steal it, which is immoral, illegal and > just plain wrong. >
You're probably in the minority. We *routinely* have gone up against competitors developing in the MS camp and rarely do they include licensing costs for the base MS technology in their quotes, often underbidding us - we run on Linux with PHP in most cases, so I would have thought that was fairly hard to do, but it happens. If I was bothered enough, I'd turn them in to the BSA - perhaps I'm actually getting bothered enough to do something in the near future. :) > Also....their land lords...have insisted on payment in the form of US > Legal Tender...even though they want to work on something a noble to all > mankind as free source code. Although they have tried to convince their > land lords of the concept of "OPEN RENT" or "Free Dwelling"...the land > lords say that the banks that they pay mortgages to have not embraced > the concept of "OPEN LENDING" or "Free Cash". In England the term would be 'squatting'. Not sure of the legal standing of squatters, but they seem to get a lot of sympathy on the TV shows I watch. :) > > I have a wife...two children. My programmers have lives and hopes and > dreams some are married...and baby needs new shoes! > > You show Pillar Software how to make money by giving away BBuilder and > we will consider it. > For better or worse, much of what many products do is being commoditized both by open source packages and, dare I say, Microsoft. That's not to say that MS is free, but due to its marketshare, just about anything they get involved in will either dominate or at the very least kill off many competitors in that space. In the ABM (anything but Microsoft) camp, many open source packages are getting 'good enough' to be used as a base for building decent CMS. There's a strange mindset about software - at least I think it's strange. We offer LogiCreate (http://www.logicreate.com) as a development platform for PHP developers. What might take someone days to do can be done in hours with LC. This isn't a direct plug - I know there are other toolkits for other platforms out there as well that can make similar claims. What's strange is that people will hesitate *SO MUCH* about spending money on it - even though source code is included - *BUT* those some companies have no problem dropping $3k on PHP training (another service we offer), then take those skills back and try to hack PHPNuke or something similar (because it's free as in 'no cost'). Rather than purchase a system that comes with most common tasks prebuilt for you (with source to make mods) they'll instead spend a significant portion of that price sending developers to training to learn only the basics of how to do the same things. This may be something unique to the PHP world - I can't say for certain. But it's still very odd, imo. Maybe it's just an aversion to software licensing in general in that community? Michael Kimsal http://www.logicreate.com 734-480-9961 -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
