On 7 May 2001, at 10:31, David Trudgett wrote:

> At 2001-05-06 11:03 +1000, Patrick O'Keeffe wrote:
>
> >Hi Jason,
> >
> > > Why do you say Trustware is "closed"? Anyone who wishes to
> > > participate in the development of the product gets the full source
> > > and there is no
> >charge.
> > >
> > > Where are the disadvantages in this?
> > >
> > > The only thing it doesn't allow that Open Source does is forking.
> >
> >This is important - That's the good thing about open source - it
> >allows forking. It hardly ever happens, but if you need to or things
> >aren't going in the direction that you'd like you can if you want to.
>
> I think that's a very important point that is often overlooked, not
> considered, or simply not understood. It bears repetition that
> _forking hardly ever happens_ because there are strong disincentives
> to doing so.
>
> What "Open Source" would probably not provide, that "Trustware"
> probably would, is significant direct income in an analogous way to
> closed source products. So, it seems to me that when someone says
> "Trustware" provides the right "structure" for Marathon, they really
> mean to say that dollars will be more easily forthcoming through being
> able to monopolise the distribution. Whether such people see that as
> primarily a personal gain, or a gain for Marathon, I wouldn't know.
>

One problem with the trustware model is that you are going to have
programmers who have no incentive to work on it in full knowlege
that the person heading this is going to make money directly with
the software while they don't make a dime of it. With Open
Source, there are other incentives for programmers to work on the
code. The big incentive for Open Source is that the programmers
have something which they can work with the capabilities they
need.