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O'Reilly on the Open Source Industry

Posted by michael on from the as-long-as-they-buy-books dept.

Idmat writes "Tim's latest opus, "The Strange Case of the Disappearing Open Source Vendors," starts with Sherlock Holmes ruminating on "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and winds up explaining why open source is good for businesses even if it isn't always good for software vendors."

5 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Business Models by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I still don't get it why people think they can make money from developing open source products. The software is free, hence no money. You can make money from extra services such as support, or by providing open source software as vlaue added items to hardware. But not from the software itself.

    Mark me flame bait...

  2. This is more important: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative
    Apparently that jackhole michael didn't this this was front page news, so let's make sure everyone heads over to apache.slashdot.org and gets the scoop:

    Apache Worm in the Wild

    Posted by michael on Friday June 28, @01:00PM

    from the patchy-server dept.
    codewolf writes "It has been reported to bugtraq by Domas Mituzas that a worm that exploits the Apache chunk bug has been found in the wild. Information on the worm can be found here. More information on the Apache bug can be found here, and patches can either be made by modifying your config file or upgrading your Apache version."

    ( Read More... | 40 of 60 comments )



  3. If O'Reilly really wonders by Krapangor · · Score: 5, Informative

    If O'Reilly really wonders why all open source vendors disappeared, then they should just open source all their books and provide then contents in electronic form and they will see what happens.
    This is also called the infamous "we don't have anything more to sell" surprise.
    Only happens once, 'cos after that you are out of business.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
  4. MOD THAT UP by mgkimsal2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Already used by mod points - sorry - but that hit the nail on the head perfectly. To go further, it would benefit society overall, even if it did hurt them and some other publishing houses. The greater good would be served though.

    --
    creation science book
  5. Cygnus... by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...was bought by Red Hat. As far as I know, they were never unprofitable, allthough in the early days they did get a few friendly development contracts with the FSF to stay in business. These days, it seem like most of Red Hats "wins" (and profit) come from the part of the company that used to be Cygnus.

    Cygnus never seriously tried to sell GNU products, instead they sold support. In fact, their original name was Cygnus Support.

    At one time they did have some "boxed products", GNUpro and even a Cygwin 1.0 box (which I'm the proud owner of). However, the real money came from support and development contracts.