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Re: [ProgSoc] Idea
John Elliot wrote:
http://thebigchair.com.au/news/executive/three?s_cid=167
Heard much of this before, over and over. Had the Howard government not
ripped the guts out of R&D tax incentives years ago, maybe Australia
would have a more comprehensive environment for IT&T business.
Universities do sponsor a lot of research (its the "latest thing" in
getting more revenue from the government), but that rarely translates
into commercial products because the business environment is not very
supportive of this research=>commercial transition.
Whilst Professor Smarr (and others) argue that high-speed broadband is
an "inhibiter", they fail to mention that the underlying issue: the lack
of "high bandwidth" applications that create money for someone (telcos,
content providers, application providers) that drive further investment.
What is the purpose of high-speed broadband (beyond ADSL2+) if all you
can do is BitTorrent down content or view YouTube videos? There is
massive value for consumers, but they are not willing to pay much for
the benefits in order to improve the system.
ProgSoc should steal the university back.
What you do is you cherry pick FOSS software and bundle it up into
'workstation' and 'server' packages for specific horizontal markets
starting from the most general lines of business and working your way
in. E.g. payroll, timesheets, accounting, billing, email and web, CRM,
POS, etc. Keep it all really simple and target 'really small'
businesses. The kind of owner/operator businesses that don't have a
clue what they're doing and are running their business on The Computer
with Word Pad and Teh Windows Excel. No-one is looking after these
people. That's gotta be every second shop on George St., for instance.
Get a catchy brand name for your suite of distributions like 'Stable
Software Systems' or something (i.e. rebrand Debian. All the cool kids
are doing it. ;), and then start walking down George St. stopping at
every door and telling them "Hi, I'm from the Programmers' Society
from the University of Technology Sydney, and we're running a
programme to help small business operators adopt free software. It
won't cost you anything and we'll help you set up and give you free*
support." And you start working with them to develop your software.
You'd need SCM systems, build systems, packaging systems, a CRM
system, a mailing list, a web site, and ultimately custom development
services for niche business. But initially you'd want to keep things
as general as possible and as small as possible. You'd start to get a
handle on what the 'real world' requirements were really quickly, and
you'd find heaps of people who would cooperate with you. You just look
after them one at a time.
* ... and all we need is google to swoop down and pick up the tab.
As admirable as this sounds, you would have a hard time making this
successful (in a business sense)... it sounds like a great way for
someone to volunteer all their free time and energy to benefit people
who are already doing well (e.g. the small businesses on George St).
Eventually the people who start this would probably burn out and leave,
although maybe the uni would bail it out/support it to some degree. And
there is always a bit of a free lunch with students, albeit with some
residual costs.
How would a complex CRM system benefit someone with walk-in retail
customers?
Unless you could somehow convince the businesses to rip out whatever
systems they already have, and replace them with open source systems
(with some maintenance cost) that are developed and maintained by
workers at low pay, I don't see how this would progress very far. I'm
not saying its impossible, just very challenging. Probably would be
better to consider this as a volunteering activity, rather than a business.
The advertising that you decry is sponsoring so much already that is not
sustainable (advertising sponsors TV and Internet services almost
entirely and reduces the cost of newspapers somewhat). This is another
example of the optimism that seems to be throughout the IT industry -
"build it and they will come", and we will work out the business model
later. If all the advertising in the world disappeared tomorrow, many
things would grind to a halt. As much as we all want free (libre and/or
gratis), there needs to be sustainability in the models. So whilst we
are hastening the technology of tomorrow, supported by weak models, we
may be setting ourselves up for a big fall. I have heard that some
online magazines are closing up shop because the advertising revenue is
pulling back. This may be related to [1], whose proponents argue that
ad-blockers are "stealing revenues", despite these claims being fairly
ludicrous. Time to set the 'general.useragent.override' option.
There was an interesting article about SaaS [2] just in the last few
days... similarly, there is a lot to overcome before FOSS will be the
majority, not the minority.
Cheers,
Nigel
[1] http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/
[2] http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9767802-16.html
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