Some years back there was a discussion of how Free Software was saving IBM's research labs.
The problem being that there's a lot of cool stuff you can work on at the labs, but unless there's a $50m or $100m market for it, there's no interest in productizing the project.
What creating a culture of allowing work on Free Software projects allowed, among other things, was satisfaction and motivation among the lab engineers in being able to produce work which, even if not immediately transformed into IBM products, was available to others. Some eventually did get rolled in to at least consulting services work (particularly in the Apache space).
Sounds like your F100 was all about killing golden-egg laying geese. And I understand your response entirely.
The problem being that there's a lot of cool stuff you can work on at the labs, but unless there's a $50m or $100m market for it, there's no interest in productizing the project.
What creating a culture of allowing work on Free Software projects allowed, among other things, was satisfaction and motivation among the lab engineers in being able to produce work which, even if not immediately transformed into IBM products, was available to others. Some eventually did get rolled in to at least consulting services work (particularly in the Apache space).
Sounds like your F100 was all about killing golden-egg laying geese. And I understand your response entirely.