Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 9:30 AM -0800 1/17/03, Tim Bray wrote:
>
>> The notion that you can make money by setting up a tollbooth on a
>> piece of Web infrastructure (and thereby driving out all
>> open-source/free offerings as a side-effect) is a radical proposal
>> without even an existence proof.
>
>
> Would either Flash or RealAudio qualify as an existence proof? If not,
> why not?
(a) I was talking about claiming patent rights on some basic
nonproprietary protocol/format like HTTP/XML/HTML etc, and
(b) Last time I checked neither of those are profitable :)
If there were an existence proof, it would be GIF, but the amount Unisys
raked in is trivial compared to the amount they've made selling
computers to support web applications of one kind or another -Tim
