> Simply not the case, lack of serious competition. If you examine > the papers filed by Caldera and the Justice Department you'll > discover that the price of MS-DOS rose dramatically for OEM customers > within weeks of Novell announcing that they were discontinuing DR-DOS. For interchangeable, substitutable software, I agree. But Linux (or any Unix for that matter) is not a useful functional substitute for MS Windows, for the reasons -- not by any means all technical -- that I listed in my original message. If Linux disappeared from the face of the earth, the price of MS Windows wouldn't change. If *Unix* disappeared, the price of Windows NT Server might go up, but desktop Windows probably wouldn't. > At this stage, Microsoft earns over 50% of their revenue from > Microsoft Office (PC Week 9/16/96). I made this point before as well (that no matter how good a job Caldera does, they won't take significant business away from Microsoft because the revenue now is in the applications). > But by and large the freeware community doesn't understand the > traditional software channel, the dynamics of the VAR channel or > the means of marketing and getting the message out. I agree. But your message doesn't help educate us. What are the key properties of these channels? How can freeware vendors use them more successfully? I'd like to see more sharing of information that can help make us successful, instead of a lot of disparagement. > Freeware OS features and discussions of DLLs and the like > are interesting to the technicians of the world but ultimately > abuyers are interested in solutions not technical features nor > politics. I agree. I brought up DLLs as an example of the Unix world's apparent inability to move beyond POSIX and X Windows in terms of software substrate, but that was a secondary issue. > Unfortunately, UNIX and the freeware community is > appears to be made up of software engineers and technicians who are > opinionated "know-it-alls" The pot calls the kettle black.... > who don't understand -- marketing. I'm happy to share my own experience in building a small (<$1M/year) but successful (>$.5M/year) company that sells semi-freeware. The product, Ghostscript, is an OEM package that is free under a GNU-like license for downloading, use, modification, and non-commercial redistribution, but requires a paid license for distribution in or with a commercial product. I did all my marketing by word-of-mouth through Internet newsgroups for the first 4-5 years (while I was working full-time for others), building up a reputation for quality and responsiveness to problem reports as the software climbed its way up the quality ladder to a commercially acceptable level. The first commercial customers told their friends; the free availability of the software meant that engineers could download it and "try before they bought" (including reading the source code) with no investment other than their time. After 2 years of a rapidly growing business, I hired a sales and marketing person who then took about a year to learn how to use trade shows (primarily Seybold DTP) and trade press to find the right companies to call. Aside from a booth at Seybold the last 2 years, I've never done any traditional advertising: there's a simply note in the free version that says where to call for commercial licensing. I did have a stroke of good fortune this past June, when, as a result of completing the first clone of H-P's PCL XL less than 3 months after the specs became available, I was able to get the ear of the editor of the Hard Copy Observer (a widely-read printing industry publication) and benefited from a 2-page article in the next issue; I suppose that falls under marketing, broadly construed. My business model is that I sell to technically knowledgeable OEMs for whom the quality of the product (measured in terms of reliability, performance, feature coverage, and fit to their needs in these areas) and the service (upgrades, support, and the availability of fast, high-quality enhancements on a contract basis when needed) are the determining factors, and who understand that as a tradeoff for these benefits, they get a product that may not be as close to a finished solution as they would like. And if an OEM doesn't allow their engineers to be a primary input for their decision-making, I'm not interested in dealing with them, because I know from experience that it will be very difficult to have a rational discussion with them that is grounded in technical reality. (I'm not saying that technology is everything, only that whether or not something actually works or can be made to work is an issue that has to be put up near the top of any discussion.) There are plenty of other models for successful businesses based around free software: I'd be interested in hearing some of them, particularly with respect to the marketing and channel issues that your message raised. I'd also be happy to answer any other questions about my own experience. I have no marketing background per se, so I'm sure the way I've described my experience doesn't quite use the usual vocabulary for discussing such things. -- L. Peter Deutsch | Aladdin Enterprises :::: ghost@aladdin.com 203 Santa Margarita Ave. | tel. +1-415-322-0103 (AM only); fax +1-415-322-1734 Menlo Park, CA 94025 | http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html "Implementation is the sincerest form of flattery."