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O'Reilly on the Open Source Industry
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."
Well, it seems pretty easy why Linux companies die. All the big Linux companies were during the dot.com . Well we all know how that turned out. Simply enough, if they created a product, somebody could come in and make a better gpl version of it. The incentive and the money wasn't there. No money = no company.
Well, in the case of todays Linux companies, le'ts see who they are.... IBM, SuSE (big in Germany),and Red Hat (it IS linux.. heh). Those are your big players (along with a few other distros). IBM makes its money by being a glue contractor.
"You need X done? We can use Linux (so you can put more money behind the hardware instead of software. Your performance will be 30% more without cost of software."
Then you have 2 major distros. They sell conveinance and/or commercial apps. Red Hat wont sell commercial stuff (yet).
Overall, this "insight" on this article is idiotic. The article is soo much more than "Why dont Open Source Companies make money?" It covers topics of governments and why ours ISNT using linux wholesale (MS marketing/lobbying). Bad Slashdot reporting. That's all. Go read the article.
doesnt this sound a little contradictory? How can something that is good for buisness be bad for software vendors, which, last time i checked, software venders were a pretty large buisness. I'm not saything that I dont agree with what the author has to see, I just think the article could have been worded a bit differently.
Try building a large complex product like, say certain commercial RDBM systems, across a dozen different Unix OSes and you quickly come to appreciate the commonality of things like GNU make. Open Source is useful for proprietary software vendors since it can help them develop their proprietry software products. A reasonable thing is to have them contribute back: patches to get the thing to compile on oddball platform xyz for example. If folks who tried to sell GNU make had a tough time (is Cygnus still in business?) it is not for lack of value of the product. The product does not lend itself to the over hyped marketing strategies that prove popular for other proprietery things like DB2 or Oracle.
Yes, I know that Wal-Mart shows up on Netcraft as running Microsoft IIS, but curiously, the operating system is Linux. So, it appears to be a case of the fairly common Apache hack, in which the Apache source is modified to output IIS as the server string. Mike Prettejohn of Netcraft assures me that the method used to find out the underlying operating system is less susceptible to modification in this way than the Web server signature.
Could this be an indicator of the future of Open Source? It seems to me that while IT departments are going to be pushing open solutions more and more, the management is going to be worried about the effect that would have on customers and users. Which could be significant, with Microsoft spending vast sums on FUD, and adding a 'Works best (or only works) with an MS-approved client/server' warning to their products. (Which we will likely see more and more of as the march to Palladium continues.) In the future, we will see more open source system masquerading outright as proprietary ones.
The second reason I foresee this happening is that the history of Open Source is replete with examples of projects such as GNU, Linux, Lindows, and XFree86, all started with the intention of replacing a proprietary product with an open one.
Frankly, the fact that there are less companies developing open products doesn't worry me, because it's much easier to start building a clone while you are small enough to fly under radar. It's only when the product is approaching a usable status that a company is needed for promotion, protection, etc. and it is then that they will spring up around the product.
Last I checked, most Open Source developers had day-jobs unrelated to their open projects.
"In my values, freedom is more important than 'serving users' in a mere practical sense." -- RMS
O'Reilly publisher is heavily publishing books on micro$oft's dotnet. =)
More to the point, the companies or organizations which make OS software their primary focus have an incentive to make software which *needs* support and/or service/training, etc. If your package was understandable to everyone, with good online help (1996 man pages don't cut it for most people), tutorials, good FAQs, etc., why would anyone pay you for support? *Most* people are only going to pay for what they need, nothing more.
creation science book
doesnt this sound a little contradictory? How can something that is good for buisness be bad for software vendors, which, last time i checked, software venders were a pretty large buisness.
... it certainly did wonders for ours.
Think back to the time of the Robber Barrons in Germany, who built castles along the Rhein and charged tolls every few miles to merchant ships.
Destroying the Robber Barrons business was bad for the Robber Barrons, but immensly good for trade, and hence virtually every other business, in the region.
Microsoft is analogous to the Robber Barrons along the Rhein in several respects: they charge a toll (tax), they deliberately break compatability (block your movement up the river for a time), they move the target every few months (each trip up the river terms and conditions for passage changed), costing you time and money to get your stuff working after a fashion (again), and so forth. Getting rid of this parasite does wonders for your business
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't think he is wondering this. Indeed, he'd probably agree with you: Because the software is freely distributable, it's not "monetizable".
But his real question is, "If all the open source vendors have disappeared, why hasn't open source itself disappeared?" And his answer is a good one: Because it gets support from businesses whose model is not selling the software but using it.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The author writes: "I have been talking with . Long story short, other speaker called this morning and said he can't do the talk. I got the impression he was in deep doo doo with his bosses. He asked me to take him off the Web site quickly, along with any reference in the description to . He said the talk can in no way appear to represent agency." As a person who is a government employee, I can tell you that it is drilled into us that we can **not** use our governmental title or agency name in anything we do publically **unless** we are offically sanctioned to "act as an agent" of that governmental body. I suspect the governmental employee above was going to speak as "a private person" (without use of his title and agency name). However, his title and agency name appeared on the agenda and he was obligated to withdraw to avoid the **appearance** of representing his governmental agency in some sort of official capacity. There is nothing sinister about it as the article seemed to imply. It happens all the time.
So how can anyone say that open source is bad for business? I happen to be a business of one person, focusing on open source software consulting. My expenses are low and the value I provide is high. And I'm quite profitable, thank you very much.
Whether or not your conclusion is correct, I think you need a quick lesson in logic. As every logician knows, X=>Y means ~Y=>~X. However, all your anecdote has proven is that the statement "it is not possible to make money from open source" is false. That's not the claim you made. It may be possible for open source to be good for your business, but bad for business overall.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
Note also that "open source" doesn't equate to your ability to download it from the 'net for free either. Somebody can distribute open-source software on CD just like closed-source software (the difference being they'd get the source code on the CD in addition to the binary).
Why would anybody pay for software they can freely view the source code for? Why not? Does making software closed-source, such as Microsoft Office, prevent it from being copied? Not one bit.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.