Dilema

[MJ Ray]

John Tapsell <tapselj0 at cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
> It all boils down to money.
> They ask me, 'why would a company pay us any money if they can get it for 
> free?'.  And I cannot answer - but then I'm not a business man.

Then you have no place in business.  Sorry.  Go learn a while, or find
someoen who is and will teach you while running this company.

> particulary since as a closed source system I'd be looking at selling it for 
> 10's of thousands of pounds per client (large company)

Yes, holding customers to ransom and screwing as much money as possible out
of the ones you have is always a good business action(!)  OK, if you find
some gullible people, you get into the black quicker, but at what price?

> To Ray - They get 5% equity, and 1.5% profit - which is _very_ good.

OK, Tapsell, and what about the control I asked about?  etc.

> Existing companies based on free software tend to provide a service (I'm 
> thinking redhat etc), which doesn't sound too safe.

We're the same.  Programming is a service and relatively expensive because
the time of skilled programmers is limited.  The natural price for programs
is near-zero because they are infinitely reproducible.  Any attempt to
violate that basic result is going to end horribly eventually.  All you can
do is try to use various legalistic obstructions to try to avoid it for a
while.

-- 
MJR ,----------------------------------------------------
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