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Best Presentation on Software Business and OSS

Posted by kdawson on from the Linux-as-Lamborghini dept.

stephe writes "Brent Williams presented 'Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007' at EclipseCon last Tuesday. Brent is (temporarily) an independent equity research analyst, who moved to Wall Street after 20 years in the software trenches. He starts with a tear-down of the Oracle Linux debate and the Microsoft Novell deal. I especially like his taking apart the commoditization myth and his observations around interface standards versus standards of implementation. He graciously allowed me to post the slides on my blog. They're getting a lot of interest from the open source business crowd, and I thought the Slashdot crowd would want to see them as well. Enjoy."

2 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Source - EclipseCon by NovaX · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perhaps the editors could have taken the slides from the source, rather than an opportunistic blogger who couldn't handle the bandwidth?

    Tech Session
    PDF slides

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    "Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
  2. Re:A lot of smoke in these slides by kripkenstein · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think he does a good job in pointing out the 'brand loyalty' issue with OSS - people prefer distros etc. for reasons that are, in part, not completely rational. But he also points out other issues relevant here, on slide 38, issues that are relevant to both proprietary software and OSS: that software has risks, and has a high degree of inability to estimate those risks. This leads to brand loyalty for fairly rational reasons.

    For example, it makes sense to stick to Red Hat as opposed to switching to Oracle's new offering, given that software is tricky stuff. Oracle may apply Red Hat patches late, they may apply them wrongly, and they make enter new bugs of their own. The same is true for CentOS - no matter how similar it is supposed to be to Red Hat, it still depends on someone applying the Red Hat patches and so forth.

    Not that I wouldn't use CentOS, I have in the past, and I might in the future. But for large corporations, it is perfectly rational to be loyal to a successful brand like Red Hat, even though they sell OSS. Thus, OSS is not a commodity market, even though it might seem like one at first glance. At least that is how I understand the slides.