[einhverfr]

Fascinating write-up which puts the economics of proprietary vs open source in full view. Gates was unhappy in the letter because it was hard to make money charging license fees in arrears. In my business, I charge for a lot of development up front.

The lesson I take away from this is that conventional software licensing, while it addresses a legitimate need in some areas of software (the need to diffuse development costs), means effectively not only shifting risk onto the developer but increasing it by orders of magnitude. The sort of risk that one has from investing in a feature for an open source project is far less than the risk that a software house takes in building the next version, because they take on all risk, centralize it, and then hope to make it back through control. This doesn't reduce risk for the end user though by very much.