RE: good references re. ontologies for S*m*ntic W*b
> I'm all in favor of proprietary software development
> for new technology, but it just doesn't make sense
> to pay again and again and again for the same old
> compiler or OS kernel. All the foundation software
Yes, I (personally) think the argument for OSS is most compelling at the
level of commoditized infrastructure pieces.
But note that commoditized "good enough" software argument is orthogonal
to open source. For example, what do you think is the biggest barrier
to people upgrading to Office XP? Is it that Star Office is "good
enough", or is it that Office 95 is "good enough"? The biggest
challenge to a company like Microsoft is to provide value-add over
previous versions of the software.
Imagine if MSFT started pricing things such that the current version was
full price, previous version half price, and any versions before that
free (with source code included, hardly matters). In other words, "good
enough" would be free, and you would only pay money if you saw
significant value add. Draw your own conclusions about what would
happen to the "free" alternatives, which tend to have feature parity
with older versions of commercial products.
IMO, no company could thrive if it could not thrive in this situation
anyway. In other words, if the company doesn't provide enough value-add
to justify the upgrade price, the company will put its own self out of
business before any "open source" or "free" competitors will. For
example, Unix vendors are crumbling to Linux because they were unable to
provide innovation that justified their commercial existence (and you
have to admit, the OS space is a pretty stale problem at this point).
It has nothing to do with "open source" or "free" -- it is the natural
lifecycle of a problem space that has been thoroughly beaten to death
and is no longer very interesting.
The only "genius" of these vendors is that they have managed to ease
their products to a gentle death while outsourcing all of their
sustained engineering, maintenance, and bugfixing costs to the hordes of
free developers.