Give Away The Platform, Sell The Tools

Here is a radical suggestion to fund the development of newly-emergent open source OS platforms: Keep the platform and as much of the other software on it free. Sell the development tools.

The term “development tools” would mean the environments created by the platform’s developers to develop software for the platform, device drivers for it, and the platform itself. One could even envision a unified virtual-machine execution environment and step-debugger, where the OS (and its apps) could be run in a VM and interactively tested…

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