I see more people reading free software to copy it to write proprietary software using the same techniques but a different implementation than people contributing.
> As I see it, then there's the market. FSMC (Free Software Marketing
> Company) will have to be extremely effective at marketing if it wants to
> be a world-wide software supplier that, according to you, will compete
> with a lot of companies that don't have that cost. Simply put, what will
> be this company market advantage ? After all all the system depends on
> the success of FSMC.
I thing the advantages are the effectiveness and efficiency of free software developments. In my actual company, which, alas, do not write free software but has a pervasive "framework" methodology (all that can be capitalized for future developments must be so), we get a big return on investment from this approach. Where I worked before, people were always reinventing the wheel, thus developments cost more because people always had to rewrite the same old basic things.
I think free software with its community/flaming/reviewing approach has raise this philosophy to another extent and thus can expect reduced costs compared to traditionnal software companies. Moreover, having "open source" software would be interesting for most companies, which would not be so easily held captives by their software providers.
> To me it seems that, as described, FSMC depends on getting a
> distribution monopoly on some free software projects. This limitation on
> distribution reduces the effectiveness of development by separating
> users from developers, putting marketers in the middle of that
> interaction. This introduction causes delays in the feedback loop that
> we agree to be an important feature of free software development. This
> means effectively reducing free software development efficiency.
I do not think so. I think there can be several FreeDevelopers-like companies who could compete and thus sustain innovation. I do not really want to replace one monopoly by another one. The requisit I see is more a matter of educating developpers not to work for free. In a lot of areas, like business-specific applications, it will not be hard because no one would think about writing for free so boring things... :-))
> An example of this, as far as I can tell, has been Caldera. They had one
> of the first "graphical" linux distributions, but they've fall beyond
> most of others in market share. My point is that this happened because
> most of its value-added software was not free and not even
> distributable.
I agree with you but in that specific case, the customers were de facto sensible to the free software advantages (at least the freedom to copy). For general purpose software developments, it might not be as simple.
Best regards,
Ludovic