rmathew - Slashdot User

"FOSS Business Model Broken" — Former OSDL CEO 412

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @09:27PM from the who-needs-support-anyway dept.

liraz writes "Stuart Cohen, former CEO of Open Source Development Labs, has written an op-ed on BusinessWeek claiming that the traditional open source business model, which relies solely on support and service revenue streams, is failing to meet the expectations of investors. He discusses the 'great paradox' of the FOSS business model, saying: 'For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open source business model is broken. Open source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world.' Cohen goes on to outline the beginnings of a business model that can work for FOSS going forward."

Submission + - Michael Dell says Linux server sales are up (silicon.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Monday October 15, 2007 @05:03AM

00_NOP writes: "Linux is growing faster in the server space than Windows says the Dell CEO:

"On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."

With Netcraft statistics in recent months showing a big increase in Windows as a webserver and with the renewed assault on Linux's legitimacy over the issue of software patents — not a problem for those of us in Europe ;-) — this is reassuring news for FOSS advocates."

Submission + - Indian AI unmasked using second order turing test (daz.com)

Submitted by

jacquesm

on Monday October 15, 2007 @04:50AM

jacquesm writes: "Indian IT experts have been testing a new generation of highly intelligent bots in IRC channels. One such bot was unmasked in an irc room after failing to pass a second order Turing Test. The bot had to be tricked into accepting the challenge and tried every trick in the book to avoid detection.

The full transcript of the interaction with the bot (called 'asterix') is here : http://ww.com/asterixbot.html , the really interesting breakthrough I think is the fact that the bot uses 'broken english' to masquerade its lack of genuine understanding, but we have become so accustomed to that because of the outsourcing of jobs that it is no longer politically correct to accept nothing less than passable english. This psychological loophole has been used to great profit by the team involved.

It's only a matter of time before you'll have to administer Turing Tests to your chat room friends to see if they are not too tired of communicating with you face to face and have replaced their online identities with bots to keep up appearances."

Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 163

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:14PM from the turn-back-the-clock dept.

eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"

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