From: Bernhard Reiter bernhard@intevation.de
I don't want to comment the first statements in this mail. There is enough public information to proove these statements for correctness....
If there is widespread distrust of BerliOS, and this is a problem, how about getting an FAQ written of peoples' reasons for distrust and FUD, followed by the responses?=20
This will probably be the next step as soon as somebody has time to do it. Of course as usual within free software development we noticed them directly first and confidentially pointed out the problems.
It seems that your notice was so confifential that nobody apart some of your friends got it.....
BerliOS did not respond and remedied them:
... otherwise we would have responded.
- the GMD's general way of working is: get government money,
create a product or special knowledge, make a spin-off to proprietorily cash on it. Where is the statement of the BerliOS people that they=20 know about this and plan to do differently?
I should comment this one because it is hard to check it for correctness without the right pointers.
GMD is doing basic research and applied research. 60% of the research found is from German ministry of science. 40% is from industrial partners and from Eropean research projects.
If there is a number of people inside GMD who have a good idea, then GMD helps them to found a new company. This typically results in a loss of money from GMD and a win for the new company. The reason for doing this is to support to found new high tech companies in Germany and thus to support the future of Germany.
The support works the following way: the people from the new company keep their office in GMD for 2 years and may use the phone, the internet and computer infrastructure for free while working 50% of the time for GMD projects and 50% of the time for their own projects. Then there is another 2 years phase during this phase the poeple may suspend their job with GMD. If the new company is successful, they stay inside the new company. If the new company is unsuccessful, then they return to GMD.
What is wrong with this strategy to support new companies?
On a short term base, it takes money from the government. On a long term base these new companies grant tax income for the government and support the German community.
Jörg
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1 schilling@fokus.gmd.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling URL: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix