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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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