[ale] mint 13 vm running out of storage space

[Chris Ricker]

On 10/15/13 6:59 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> I think David said Red Hat made $ 100 Million in the last quarter.  What's not to like?
>
> Well OF COURSE they're a profitable company.  They have a $ 10 Billion (assuming it's like Debian in complexity) product, which is in high demand, which they give away for free, which they can charge large amounts of support costs for, AND FOR WHICH THEY DIDN'T PAY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT COSTS!  So, all they have to do is a reasonable amount of continuous development and OPERATE A SERVICE BUSINESS with reletatively minimal overhead versus their revenue.

Shout all you want but surely you don't really believe that. Look at 
attributions for corporate contributions to Linux. RH certainly has paid 
a huge share of the development costs. And that's the beauty of open 
source -- it allows companies to be more fiscally responsible while 
funding focused innovation since they can share the costs of baseline 
across companies. Think of it as 10 largish companies sharing "common" 
efforts rather than throwing money away writing 10 different versions of 
ps and ls, so they have more money left to use elsewhere that's actually 
interesting...

> But how many other FOSS companies are profitable?  Is Ubuntu, Mozilla, LibreOffice?  Even if they are, I'll bet I can find you tons more who are not.  I don't need a support contract for FireFox.  Most people don't.   What about Wikipedia?  They're barely surviving.  Everybody contributes the articles.  They distribute them for free.  People love them, and use them all the time.  They have very large overhead, and are always begging for money.
Ubuntu is turning the corner if it hasn't already and Mozilla is quite 
profitable. LibreOffice I don't know about

Wikipedia isn't "barely surviving." They have no real revenue model 
other than donations (unlike, say, Mozilla which had the Google revenue 
stream), so you see a visible constant request from them for donations 
-- but their donation drives are highly successful and they are 
consequently well-funded. But they're also an excellent example of 
someone using open source responsibly as a cost-effective lever to 
extend their business. Large parts of Wikipedia operations and practices 
are based on the open source OpenStack infra code/processes/etc, and 
Wikipedia extends and contributes back to OpenStack infra code for 
others to further use and enhance, because that code base is important 
to their business model. Meanwhile, they don't contribute much back to 
the Linux kernel because there's not a lot of business value to them to 
be derived from innovation in that space beyond the already existent 
baseline of "we need a good open Unixish type thingie to use to run our 
hardware". They're how open source in a business is supposed to work...

> Let's pick on Boeing, just because I like airplanes.  Let's say, hypothetically, way back in the beginning, when Boeing was founded, they decided to go all FOSS and FOSH.  They publish and give away all their plans, schematics, designs, strategies, source code, artwork, parts lists, vendor sources, etc.  ALL the intellectual property.  And, let's say they never patented any of it, since that's contrary to FOSS and FOSH.  What would be the result?

The airplane industry is actually commonly used as a text book example 
of the harmful effects of patenting. The so-called "Wright brothers 
patent war" put aviation advancement to a halt for years, to the point 
that the US government eventually intervened and FDR forced patent 
pooling on the industry. Meanwhile, the US in WWI had to use French 
airplanes because no suitable American machines were available due to 
the patent war... And at the base of it all, the Wright Bros patent that 
initially caused all the above mess likely should have never been issued 
due to prior art