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Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?

Posted by Zonk on from the argh-i've-got-a-quarter-in-my-eye dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Probably. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    We need some kind of Godwin's Law for car analogies...

  2. Re:eh? by chris_eineke · · Score: 3, Informative

    Last time I checked the state of Red Hat et al made not a mote of difference to my project.
    Is your program written in C? Or is written in a language that uses C as its intermediary? Or is it written in a language whose interpreter was written in C? Then RedHat does made a mote of difference since, afaik, they're one of the bigger contributors to gcc.
    --
    "All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
  3. Re:I completely agree by Kjella · · Score: 3, Informative

    KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined.

    Well, I'm not that familiar with the KDE toolkit beyond being a KDE user, but I'd say the Qt toolkit is certainly being highly refined by Trolltech. With the release of Qt4, pretty much the whole KDE project has gone into a big upgrade cycle, with KDE4 out in late October. So while it might seem KDE progress has been slow in the last year or two, I think it will raise the bar when it arrives.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. False dilemma by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    What a lot of people don't realize is that companies that rely on projects like Nagios have a huge incentive for the project to continue, even if they don't contribute. If the original contributors decided to quit, these companies would have to pick up the slack, meaning that these projects are much more likely to continue as companies invest in 'improvements', even if those improvements are not contributed to the original code base.

    Also, projects aren't 'punished' when companies take the code and run with it. Think of open source as a non-excludable good. Companies can't hurt a project by building closed software on top of it, but can only heighten interest in the project's success.