Yep.  Lower risk and in case of risk, the risk is borne 
by the software vendor.  Who bears the risk if the 
vendor is a company delivering open source?  As I 
understand it, the company making the delivery. So, 
for Linux, that would be IBM, Red Hat, etc.  Now if 
these companies refuse to assume that risk, they 
will have some problems selling it.  In the contracting 
world, that is called "indemnification".  If the big companies 
won't indemnify a product or service, big buyers back 
off the deal.  Read your RFPs. The only advantage to 
open source there is escrow and even then, maybe not 
because versions, etc., have to be accounted for.

Meanwhile, the less risky bets are on the companies 
that have already licensed the necessary pieces from 
their owners for either cash or value in kind.  
Companies without value in kind are forced to use 
cash.  Companies with value in kind can create 
perfectly straightforward and legal trading aggreements 
that maintain cash assets while obtaining rights. 
It makes indemnification not just cheap, but free. 

Oh, and it makes getting more IP a high value quest. 
So innovation is guaranteed the old fashion way: earn it.

So just as the same people who talked frictionless 
economy and the rest of the rot of the dot.bomb are 
now talking about the disappearance of IP in software, 
the importance of IP is on the increase as it represents 
a quite powerful value in kind.  The open source 
community must be very careful not to believe that 
what they have is more valuable than the IP being 
traded in kind.  Netscape did the same dumb thing.

But it's just more fun to lay into MS than to 
understand the big picture.  MSPhobia a neat 
distraction; keeps 'em welded together in a 
common cause against a common perceived enemy, 
and keeps 'em just as blind and witless and 
ready to make the same mistakes Netscape made.

Cui bono?  

len


From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@[...].com]

of course closed source companies like ms could violate lots of
copyrights and we'd never know because noone can look at the code....
hmmm... 

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