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It is not enough that we win;
all others must lose" Larry Ellison, Oracle
Corporation.
Chilling words indeed, but what
relevance is this to the TurboCASH community? Not much except that
they are uttered by the Chairman and major shareholder of the worlds
largest open source software company, Oracle.
Its all a background to the current
legal case between Oracle
and Google over the infringement of Java. What makes it relevant
to us is that Oracle is the owner of Java, Open Office and MySQL,
technologies very relevant to the open source movement. The current
actions by Oracle have alienated
Open source projects like Ubuntu.
The question is should the TurboCASH
community care?
I guess not, these are not our battles
and TurboCASH marches on irrespective, yet it is a stark reminder to
us that we are not working in a void. TurboCASH is not a charity. We
compete in a market against proprietary companies, employing
thousands of people. These companies spend less than 10% of their
revenues on development. The rest is spent on an army of cash
extractors and dividend clippers. Do not underestimate the
competition. These are people that really enjoy clipping their
dividends, and have no intention of giving up that source - their
licence fees. Oracle is just firing the warning shots, expect the whole open source industry to come under
pressure.
Everytime TurbCASH wins someone loses
and those losses are mounting. A free TurboCASH means that someone
else did not get paid $500 in licence fees. Currently this bleeds at
around $50 000 a day, when you add in upgrades and renewable licence
fees. Our mission must be to make TurboCASH and open source so
powerful, that the marketing efforts of the proprietary software
companies become ineffective. With stakes like these, expect the
battle field to heat up.
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