Re: [Fsfe-uk] Time to boycot OLPC?

[Ian Lynch]

On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 14:50 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> Ian Lynch wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 11:06 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> >   
> >> At the end of the 
> >> day, the problem reduces to "selling a free software desktop", and 
> >> nobody has really made a profit from that yet.
> >>     
> >
> > Probably because they need to sell a service of which the free desktop
> > is part - works for cell phones.
> >   
> 
> I'm not sure I really buy into that argument, actually. In the mobile 
> phone world, the people developing the software are selling a product - 
> the phone - and the people delivering the service are the operators. In 
> that respect, it's no different to Microsoft developing Windows and an 
> ecosystem of businesses supporting it. Mobile phones aren't a services 
> play unless you're an operator, and the operators are just resellers.

Seems to me though that if you build a business as a service provider
and you can tap into a market that could not previously afford your
product by reducing costs using commodity hardware and FOSS it is in
your interest to contribute to sustaining the FOSS and not to get locked
in to a single source of supply for any component of what you are
delivering. The latter is a risk not worth taking unless you really have
to. On a big enough scale software is a marginal cost provided you don't
let one of the suppliers get monopoly control.

> Fundamentally, I don't really buy into the "free software should be a 
> services play" 

I'm not saying what it should be, I'm saying what might be possible in
one particular service scenario in schools where I know the market well.
If it had been done identically before, it wouldn't be innovative. Since
I have written a detailed business plan that will hopefully get a lot of
money chucked at it I might get the chance to find out. If not it might
never happen ;-)

> argument though, either. If you're selling a service 
> rather than software, the software immediately becomes almost 
> irrelevant,

That depends on volume. If I sell 2 million laptops and save $5 each on
Windows licenses it's still 10 million and the margin on these machines
is going to get smaller and smaller. On that scale I might well be
better to design and source my own machines. I think Mandriva is
profitable and it does Linux desktops. Not sure about Canonical but they
have enough reserves to keep going for quite a while. While there is
Linux desktop development I might as well tap into it.

>  and that's basically what has happened to the OLPC project, 
> except that there 'education' supplants software, to seed the kind of 
> self-learning that 8-bit micros did. They've just realised that you 
> don't need free software to do that.

You don't if the software license costs come down to zero or very close
to it. Free software is likely to be instrumental in making that happen
though and then as stuff moves to the web the desktop OS will become
irrelevant anyway. I think that is probably worse for MS than for anyone
else. 

Ian
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