Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:Just To Be Clear... (Score 1) 312

by G Morgan (#28182415) Attached to: Should Enterprise IT Give Back To Open Source?

I think you need to be very careful when talking about 'paying back as much as you get'. It is very easy to underestimate even what a small contribution is worth. If somebody improves the kernel then that fix potentially benefits millions. The correct measure of contribution is not simply how much of the code base was improved but that multiplied by how many people it benefited. For clearly it is absurd to expect a company to contribute back the value it received to countless other people. Such a thing would be contributing millions of times more than you received.

Anyway that is how I would look at it. Measure benefit to the company as number of lines of code* used multiplied by the number of deployments. Measure contributions by a similar measure of number of lines contributed multiplied by the number of people using it. It is clear that even tiny amounts of contributions can easily outstrip what you've used yourself.

*I realise that LOC is not a good measure in practice. The concept still stands though. It is work contributed multiplied by the number of times it is used that matters in both directions.

Comment: What about SCO? (Score 1) 221

by G Morgan (#26563939) Attached to: Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization

When will SCO surpass Sun? Who else has the brilliant plan of charging $699 for something other people are giving away for free. Imagine it, SCO are making that much more for every copy of Linux they shift.

Surely this unique and exciting business plan of charging more than the opposition must eventually pay dividends.

Comment: Re:paludis -s && paludis -pi everything (Score 2, Informative) 120

by G Morgan (#21306559) Attached to: Has the Novell/Microsoft Deal Made a Difference?
I'd say it's had a huge impact. A lot of anti-corporate types have bleated on about it, consistently hoping to hell that it has an impact as proof of the evilness of allowing corporations into our FOSS world. I've had a lot of headaches reading the repetitiveness.

As it is the deal is irrelevant. All it has done is proven many have a capacity to shoot themselves (and those around them) in the foot. The only real damage has been done by our own. Of course MS knew that people would go off the deep end, which is the impact they hoped for. Makes the community look immature and that has the potential to scare off pointy headed types.
