<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#663366" face="'trebuchet ms', sans-serif">Wow! </font><span style="color:rgb(102,51,102);font-family:'trebuchet ms',sans-serif">...all the poor guy wanted to know was if there was any tool available for normalization of carrier rate sheets!</span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
</div><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="color:rgb(102,51,102);font-family:'trebuchet ms',sans-serif"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:58 AM, C. Savinovich <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:c.savinovich@itntelecom.com">c.savinovich@itntelecom.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Verdana"><div><br></div><div>Sure someone will benefit from it. But what about all those others who are financially affected by it? I certainly do not think that someone necessarily always contributes. It ultimately affects our economy, because money doesn't circulate, and many people who are in a perfect position to disburse money just don't do it. It affects an entire industry (the software industry) that could flourish and create even better products thanks to a competition that could exists if there were financial rewards. Ultimately, free software (not open source) affects the little guy and benefits the big guys. Gone are the days when a talented programmer could create a program and make a million dollars from his basement with his talent. If your company name is not Google, if you don't do a tap and a dance to an investor, then you got no chance, as opposed to the days when you could just sell your own version of Vicidial and make money for a year.<br>
</div></span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Something must be said about this...if you have any visibility or are cognizant of the startup scene all around the world where more than EVER before, 18-yr old students have started companies right out of their dorm rooms built on open-source software and created products and services which were again offered completely free of charge, played their cards right, participated in hackathons, attended every startup igniter and/or incubator program that took place, rented RVs, slept in tents outside Austin for SXSW and didn't know night from day for 6-9 mths of building their service, you would know that those days are not gone. Those days are NOW, HERE! There was hardly ever a time where a startup could be launched right out a dorm room without a single cent of capital investment in infrastructure because there's EC2, and zero cent in platforms, OS, frameworks, APIs or marketing. If you can code, and have an idea, you can have a company, market completely on word-of-mouth via social media, host on EC2 on a pay-as-you-go on money you save or borrow from your parents and friends and if the service is worthwhile for even 100,000 users, you become the target of an acquisition by some other company that you may be just a tiny piece of the puzzle. </div>
<div><br></div><div>90% of the .coms that I see today are completely useless and solve no problem that existed but provide a "nice to have" service...or make people believe that something WAS an issue when it really wasn't exactly a pain point, but they'd use it if someone other SOD built it and let them use it for free. Like people have said, if your product has better value when shared than when it's not, it's better to share. Because you never know. What might be just a "hobby" for you, could become a revolution. Twitter wasn't built to be what it is today. Groupon wasn't built to be what it became...both of these were started to solve a personal problem and was almost a bit of a joke (from what I have read coming from the horse's mouth, the founders). It's the public that found more uses of Twitter that gave twitter the boost and critical mass that it became a revolutionary service. All it was meant to be was so these guys could avoid sending 200 texts in the days where we paid per text to figure out if any of their 200 contacts were up for meeting them at the pub in the city. Much better for a central service to send out texts for them to only who *chose* to receive those texts i.e. their followers, than for them to send out 200 texts to everyone they knew (annoying half of them) when they could just send 1 text to a unique number. There's a reason why twitter is limited to 140 chars.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So like others have said, it's essentially survival of the fittest. If what you create is of sufficient value, your dues will be paid sooner or later, if not in cash, then in Kind or Karma :)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Just to finish my rant off, I find it funny when I read a discussion like that when you yourself are sitting here on the list of one of the most popular FREE software package which ironically runs on a FREE operating system that you didn't pay a dime for. </div>
<div><br></div><div>If for e.g. you have a tool that does the above required function and really don't want to give it for free then you could package it in a free, lite and pro package where each package handles X number of lines of rates, X carriers, and doesn't handle rate updates and give that away for free. The lite does slightly more lines, more carriers, handles updates and allows upload to MySQL but costs $50 and then Pro can handle more of everything or unlimited, takes input from DBs of various types, provides an API or some sort to embed in a routing engine, uploads to more types of DBs, and whatever else. There are several ways to skin a cat. Doesn't have to be Free or Paid and nothing in the middle. Remember only a Sith deals in Absolutes ;)</div>
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