You might be worse off than I thought if you're not sure...are you even conservative?
Why should you reconsider open source? Because, it threatens the US software industry, and the security of our nation. Most Linux guys close their ears as soon as they hear something like that, but maybe you'll listen.
Linux is eating through the US Unix economy, and is returning a fraction of those former dollars to our tech economy. We gain millions in new Linux sales, but lose billions in lost Unix sales.
And the open source nature of the code means we're giving that stuff away for free to all our worldwide comptetitors, and even worse to our adversaries. There's no export control laws on that stuff (yet), and there's not much return revenue either.
Bottom line is this "service minus sales" business model is a faulty one, plus it makes it virtually impossible for any company to get a technical leg up with their product code without have to share it with their competition. The whole movement is about taking everyone's code and giving it out worldwide for free, and America just wasn't built like that. Foreign companies like SuSe are just trojan horses to pluck intellectual property from the likes of IBM and Novell, and so far are getting away with it. Did you know that "Red Flag Linux" is the official operating system of the red chinese government? And that it is directly based on a version of Red Hat they were legally given for free? Do you see the problem yet, or did you quit listening after the first sentence?
The free market thrives on the principle of the better product beating out the inferior product, not always in technological merit, but also in price and business model. If OSS is winning, that is only because the American free market wants it to. As a conservative, you should value the free market.
And the open source nature of the code means we're giving that stuff away for free to all our worldwide comptetitors, and even worse to our adversaries.
And in return, we get a lot for free. It is, in action, the Jeffersonian ideal of maximum freedom of inventions advancing the art faster than the monopolies that restrictive copyright creates.
Bottom line is this "service minus sales" business model is a faulty one, plus it makes it virtually impossible for any company to get a technical leg up with their product code without have to share it with their competition.
IBM is thriving on it. Their mainframe sales loaded with Linux are doing very well. The web hosting market is doing very well with it, giving people lower-priced hosting at a good profit.
Foreign companies like SuSe are just trojan horses to pluck intellectual property from the likes of IBM and Novell, and so far are getting away with it.
Some foreign distributors will be leeches, as will some American ones. Other foreigners have contributed a LOT of code in Linux. The IP is coming in our direction, too. Hell, it was started by a guy from Finland.
You might also want to know that the OSS license only attaches itself to code in that OSS product or statically linked to it. You can still write closed-source for an OSS system.
Did you know that "Red Flag Linux" is the official operating system of the red chinese government?
Yes. So?
BTW, you might want to know that one of the reasons we're able to talk here, with Jim staying within budget, is that Free Republic is run entirely on OSS, using Linux, Apache and Perl.
BTW, don't you mean "American-owned foreign companies like SuSe"?
We ain't doin a damn thing! They are giving away their code. It's their right, they wrote it.