[ale] mint 13 vm running out of storage space

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Chris,

It wasn't really my intent to shout.  One thing I've always hated about email is it's inability to express emotion well, if at all, and in different degrees.  The email client on my tablet is set to text only mode and I have limited options for enhancing the text.  But I was only going for emphasis, not shouting.  Maybe there was too much.

I'm absorbing all the information presented here and learning about the topics discussed.  I appreciate all the things people are sharing.

Interesting info about the Wright brothers.  I had heard about that but hadn't studied it.

It IS an interesting debate about how companies can develop useful products, make a profit, and survive the competition, and at the same time, be open and transparent, when possible.

Sincerely,

Ron



Chris Ricker <chris.ricker at gmail.com> wrote:

>On 10/15/13 6:59 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>> I think David said Red Hat made $ 100 Million in the last quarter. 
>What's not to like?
>>
>> Well OF COURSE they're a profitable company.  They have a $ 10
>Billion (assuming it's like Debian in complexity) product, which is in
>high demand, which they give away for free, which they can charge large
>amounts of support costs for, AND FOR WHICH THEY DIDN'T PAY FOR THE
>DEVELOPMENT COSTS!  So, all they have to do is a reasonable amount of
>continuous development and OPERATE A SERVICE BUSINESS with reletatively
>minimal overhead versus their revenue.
>
>Shout all you want but surely you don't really believe that. Look at 
>attributions for corporate contributions to Linux. RH certainly has
>paid 
>a huge share of the development costs. And that's the beauty of open 
>source -- it allows companies to be more fiscally responsible while 
>funding focused innovation since they can share the costs of baseline 
>across companies. Think of it as 10 largish companies sharing "common" 
>efforts rather than throwing money away writing 10 different versions
>of 
>ps and ls, so they have more money left to use elsewhere that's
>actually 
>interesting...
>
>> But how many other FOSS companies are profitable?  Is Ubuntu,
>Mozilla, LibreOffice?  Even if they are, I'll bet I can find you tons
>more who are not.  I don't need a support contract for FireFox.  Most
>people don't.   What about Wikipedia?  They're barely surviving. 
>Everybody contributes the articles.  They distribute them for free. 
>People love them, and use them all the time.  They have very large
>overhead, and are always begging for money.
>Ubuntu is turning the corner if it hasn't already and Mozilla is quite 
>profitable. LibreOffice I don't know about
>
>Wikipedia isn't "barely surviving." They have no real revenue model 
>other than donations (unlike, say, Mozilla which had the Google revenue
>
>stream), so you see a visible constant request from them for donations 
>-- but their donation drives are highly successful and they are 
>consequently well-funded. But they're also an excellent example of 
>someone using open source responsibly as a cost-effective lever to 
>extend their business. Large parts of Wikipedia operations and
>practices 
>are based on the open source OpenStack infra code/processes/etc, and 
>Wikipedia extends and contributes back to OpenStack infra code for 
>others to further use and enhance, because that code base is important 
>to their business model. Meanwhile, they don't contribute much back to 
>the Linux kernel because there's not a lot of business value to them to
>
>be derived from innovation in that space beyond the already existent 
>baseline of "we need a good open Unixish type thingie to use to run our
>
>hardware". They're how open source in a business is supposed to work...
>
>> Let's pick on Boeing, just because I like airplanes.  Let's say,
>hypothetically, way back in the beginning, when Boeing was founded,
>they decided to go all FOSS and FOSH.  They publish and give away all
>their plans, schematics, designs, strategies, source code, artwork,
>parts lists, vendor sources, etc.  ALL the intellectual property.  And,
>let's say they never patented any of it, since that's contrary to FOSS
>and FOSH.  What would be the result?
>
>The airplane industry is actually commonly used as a text book example 
>of the harmful effects of patenting. The so-called "Wright brothers 
>patent war" put aviation advancement to a halt for years, to the point 
>that the US government eventually intervened and FDR forced patent 
>pooling on the industry. Meanwhile, the US in WWI had to use French 
>airplanes because no suitable American machines were available due to 
>the patent war... And at the base of it all, the Wright Bros patent
>that 
>initially caused all the above mess likely should have never been
>issued 
>due to prior art
>



--

Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
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