[Fsfe-france] Re: The Community is the Company

[Ludovic Pénet]

> The FSMC will not direct what developers need to work on what. The developers 
> work like they do now like a free market, developing what they want, 
> organizing themselves like they want. But say there are customers that want 
> voice recognition applications, the FSMC will transmit that market 
> information to the developers in FreeDevelopers. Then whoever wants to work 
> on it and build cooperating/competing teams to work on it, can do so. Then 
> what gets used and paid for, is distributed to the developers in an equitable 
> way.
It will not do it for many, boring, business-specific developments. A lot of money is generated by the development of specific software for specific businesses and in this case, only the customer knows (ahem, should know :-) ) what its needs really are.

> ironically for these customers, free as in beer is not a plus. It is a reason 
> for not using the software. These customers especially will be the ones who  
> will go to the FSMC and generally they will be enough to fund most of the 
> development. We will make it the statement that, no one got fired for buying 
> FSMC software. 
It might take more, such as giving some guarantees over developed software. In my company, for instance, we always provide a one year guarantee on our softwares. And we have to produce something that works, we can not put a disclaimer and tell use it at your own risk. I know a lot of people will oppose proprietary softwre companies like microsoft to gnu/linux to get a point, but there are also serious software companies, like Sun, who provides software they guarantee and that (usually) really works.

> Now, I have a challenge. I have spent a lot of time working on the CommCo and 
> explaining it. Now, instead of putting me on the defensive and having to 
> defend my system. Why don't you construct a better one? I find most people in 
> the community attack any idea as bad, which is the easy thing to do, but then 
> do nothing more. While an idea may be bad, the current situation can still be 
> worse. It is silly to attack any new idea and remain with a bad status quo. 
Isn't it, at least in part, the "flaming" that did the quality of free software? Hopefully, it will do the quality of free developers. :-)
The points I doubt the most in your project are:
	- just one company producing free software. having just one company can not be good.
	- developpers freely developing and the clients paying what they like. It can be true for mainstream software but I do not think it might for everything
	- the guarantee problem. Software provided "as is" is not acceptable for many businesses. Even it they take greater risks by using windows. :-)

Best regards,

Ludovic