[Golden Eagle]

This of course builds a quantity of people who like and use those tools and get hired by companies who will make use of those tools and skilled people, to buy the products and services of a US company, which results in income to said US company, and taxes paid on that income and dividends paid to many a US shareholder (who in turn pay taxes on those dividends -sigh), and pension funds et al.

Sounds nice, but how does ANY of that happen when you give your product away for free? Perpetually?

[AFreeBird]

Sounds nice, but how does ANY of that happen when you give your product away for free? Perpetually?

Geez-O-Pete!

Are you really that frickin dense or do you just play that way on the net?

So IBM is giving away multi-million dollar mainframes and serivce contracts?! Even the free (as in beer) DB2 will only get you so much and then you'll have to pony up to scale it.

And I guess having a pool of talent out their that knows your software won't help the companies that BUY the hardware that that software runs on either?

What a putz.