[MUD-Dev] banning the sale of items

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 02:54:26 +0000 (GMT) 
Matthew Mihaly <the_logos at achaea.com> wrote:

> Publically traded companies have a mandate to create shareholder
> value, and any other goal (such as creating an 'ethical' game) is
> negligent management.

      This reply is wildly off-topic, but hits a point that I
      suspect a few members on this list will confront in not too
      many years.  As it is off-topic, please redirect replies to
      the Meta list.

While this is a commonly held view, it ignores any time scoping, or
definition of what "value" is (as value may not be defined in terms
of currency numbers).  Open Source companies have had to confront
this particular dilemma with some care as the practice of Open
Source is often in direct conflict with short(or long) term profit
(value).  

  Consider VA which has a staff of over a dozen full time software
engineers, many of them very senior and very well compensated who
all only work on Open Source projects (ie significant burdened cost
to VA) -- several of which could potentially be made closed source
(they're sole authors/copyright holders) and sold for non-negligable
profits.  However VA is stated and defined as an OpenSource company.
Thus VA's prospectus and other filings all carefully identify that a
slightly different metric is being used and what it is, and why.

What view (and whether) the courts would take on a shareholder suit
that XYZ OpenSource company "gave away product Q as Open Source"
when it was worth a $$$ revenue stream as a closed source product
has yet to be seen.  

Another example class of companies, publicly traded and not a small
one, in such a situation, are those that have committed to various
unusually stringent self-set ecological/health standards both in
their products/emissions and workplaces.  Not uncommonly this has
involved significant extra expense and has more than once visibly
cut into profits and dividends.  BUT, those principles were also
listed on their prospectii (like VA's) as a method in which they
deviated from what might be expected.

Shareholder value?  The value they are offering (OpenSource
companies and the environmentally concious), is not just ticker
price.  However, the "other value" is generally abstract, or with a
very long term impersonal realisation time.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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