Robert Pogson

InfoWorld has a FUD article questioning the viability of FLOSS desktop applications. The authour and some commentators go on and on about the lack of a viable business model for FLOSS. They ignore the obvious:

• FLOSS does not need a viable business model to succeed. It just needs people to use and to embrace FLOSS. The world needs software and can create its own. It does not need “business” to do that. Many hands make light work. The world has billions of people and millions of us can create software.
• Successful business models can be created on FLOSS: OpenOffice.org, FireFox, Google, RedHat, Suse, etc. They can do it on the desktop and server and they have done so.
• The question of how the programmers get paid has been answered:
  • businesses that make money doing whatever can pay programmers instead of licensing fees
  • youngsters learning the trade can do FLOSS as a part of their learning and to put something good on the resume
  • people can create FLOSS applications for fun or to help them do what they like to do or for work
  • people can contribute to FLOSS what they can and share the work with others while using others’ work – sharing works
• the GPL and other Free Software licences mean Free Software does not depend on the success or failure of a business. The software remains Free however the business goes

So, TFA and some of the comments are pure ignorance. The presumption is that OpenOffice.org has failed as desktop software because M$’s Office still remains active. What nonsense! That is “winner-takes-all” and not relevant to the question of success or failure. Being driven from the market is only one way to fail and monopolizing the market is only one way to succeed. M$ has failed drastically in that while people may use the software, many hate the company and its software. How is that “success”? Further, OpenOffice.org is doing very well with 100 million users. How is that “failure”?

I instroduce Scribus, Koffice, Lyx and AbiWord to my students. They like them all. All those products are successful. People can do amazing things with them and the programmers did get paid.

I have introduced many teachers and students to GCompris which is a suite of 80 applications to teach young children all kinds of useful skills and facts. The teachers that created the programme produced it to help them do their jobs. They are paid to teach and the sharing of the software is a natural thing they do to support their profession and to help children. GCompris is a wildly successful desktop application.

There are thousands of desktop applications that are FLOSS and many are successful, so the premise of the article is false and the answer to the question is that FLOSS is the tree of life for desktop applications. They all start small and grow or not according to the vagaries of the software cycle, not the wishes of large corporations. Large corporations have done well to embrace FLOSS on the desktop and server but they are not the deciding factor and their particular business models are not particularly relevant to the topic of FLOSS.