cyril_kearney - 6:10 pm on Mar 12, 2002 (gmt 0)

I once got an offer from a casino. They would give me a "free" room in their hotel in exchange for me buying 2500 dollars in chips. At then end of my stay I could cash them all in (or as many as I had left or more if I got lucky).

Now it struck me that I was not really getting anything for free, but what was happening was that I was being asked to commit to the first couple of steps of someone’s marketing plan.

The casino was not being altruistic and intended to make a profit off that free room. I, along with others were being courted with the free room. Nothing wrong with it. They were very upfront about it. The casino was just a vendor using the free room to get me within arms reach so that he could make a profit.

It seems to me that Linux and the Open Source community has much the same business model as the casino operator. At heart they are as capitalistic as Bill Gates and motivated to making a profit the same way as Microsoft. They hawk something free but in the end they make a profit.

Here is the url of a different view than mine.
[builder.com.com...]

Perhaps others will care to comment.