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Can Open Source Companies Stay That Way?
JoeGee writes: "According to this article on ZD Net, more and more companies born from open source projects are beginning to move towards closed source products as a source of revenue. Version 5 of GFS will be closed source, and even SuSE's director of sales Holger Dyroff has a quote that seems to disparage the service model of revenue. The one company that refuses to change its operations is, surprisingly, Red Hat. Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann says 'We believe the Red Hat brand stands for open-source.'" Yes, this is a dupe. Bad Tim! *whack*
Whoever marked my post as "troll" -- it's not. I know nobody likes to hear the truth but that's the way it is. We have all got to wake up now the bubble is over. Just talk to any ordinary person in the street about the idea of running a business based on giving software away for nothing. They will think you are a total fruit-loop, as if you said you were going to make money by selling vacations on the Moon or by investing in edible cardboard toys (It's the next big thing!)
BTW, looking at the long roll-call of PhD's, grad students, and very experienced and skilled professional programmers contributing to Free software, one could hardly dismiss us as "geeks in their bedrooms."
Are you saying that PHD, grad students and programmers aren't geeks? Or they don't have bedrooms? In what way can they not be dismissed as 'geeks in their bedrooms'?
Note that the company behind Postgresql went bankrupt, and the company behind apache is making a proprietary version of apache.
I don't deny that there are successful free software projects but they are still amateur efforts compared with commercial development. I don't want to demean amateur projects, but they are not in the same league as commercial work. There is a vast difference between some developers getting together on a mailing list in their spare time compared with hundreds or thousands of developers and ancilliary staff working full-time on commercial projects. The commercial projects not only produce software but organize the resources, providing pensions, health insurance, paid vacation etc. I can build a kit-car in my garage, and collaborate with other kit-car enthusiasts on the internet, but it doesn't mean I can compete with Ford, when they employ thousands of full-time professional engineers, salesmen, lawyers and even run their own international airline.
Amateur projects tend to be organised around a few people and very much depend on those people maintaining their interest in the project. That simply isn't a sufficiently solid foundation for a modern economy which needs to undertake hugely complex, long-term and capital-intensive projects.