Coffee and Open Source

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

Here's a little scenario playing itself out at work:

Company provides free coffee for workers.

This morning, they're setting up a fancy flavored/gourmet dispenser
and coffeemaker right next to the industrial coffeemaker we've been using.

Except the new one has a little coin slot and a $0.50 sticker on it.

So, I'm thinking: 
  $0.00 Coffee = Open Source
  $0.50 Coffee = Microsoft
And,
  Only for the first day, the $0.50 cofee is free = As part of the DOJ 
  settlement/conviction, MS giving today's version of WinXP for free to 
  schools.

And, like the throngs waiting to pay $99 to get their copy of Windows98
on the first day of release, the line for the (free today) $0.50 coffee 
was ten deep.

So, I'm enjoying the humor in the irony of the analogy. Then I find
out that the $0.00 coffee is going away tomorrow. Apparently, folks were
taking cases of the "free" coffee home with them for their personal
use (or to sell on eBay for all I know). So, the supply of $0.00 coffee
was eliminated by management, in favor of the $0.50 self-sustaining
(and its inter-twined enforced single-serve pricing model).

Can you say "product activation"?

And, finally, the question is: 
  Is the only contribution of the Free software "takers" to its own demise?

Is it a realistic possibility that if MS and terrible US IP laws "win",
that the motivation to contribute Open Source will diminish and stagnate?
Effectively, becoming obsolete and marginalized by continuted neglected 
development? TNSTAAFL comes to mind.

For an analogy, making turntables is a well-known technology. Even if 
they were free to make, produce, and distribute, people would likely have
still abandoned them for CDs. It doesn't matter how "good" your turntable 
is when the knowledge base required for the continued existence of the
turntable industry goes away. Look at NASA. They've got media with loads
of scientific information on it that they can't read because the knowledge to 
use or maintain the equipment to retrieve it has been lost. Its not a 
question of GPL, the knowledge was lost due to lack of interest in 
preserving it. Usenet was also free and public. But the Internet Wayback 
Machine and Google can only save so much of that information. So, the 
Open Source movement's continued evolution is not a licensing problem.

IMHO, the OS movement needs to galvanize behind "building" and "growing"
more folks that write code, and more importantly, *fix*, *extend*, and 
*maintain* the huge mass of OS and GPL code already in existence.

Discuss.

Mike808/

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