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Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion?
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue. "MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of 'taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market.' If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."
Okay first off, a better article than link in summary: Marketwire article
Now as for seeing the actual study: The Standish Group's "The Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
One of the variants of the parable has the glazier paying people to break windows in the first place. Those are more accurate analogies to the non free software world. NDAs for simple things like text formats are a form of vandalism, especially when they are backed up by hardware NDAs, software patents and other nonsense. The whole market is still suffering from mistakes made back in the 1980s and it's a good thing to see the mistake coming to an end. Every dollar saved by free software is one that won't be used to screw you later.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's just it, it's not costing anybody anything, there'd be an additional $60 billion inflationary pressure on the economy without F/OSS.
I could just as well say that not winning the lottery every week is "costing" me billions a year. Small analyst groups releasing sensationalist reports at $1000 a copy are costing industry far more than open source.
Good job not doing any research at all. Despite the sensational headline a few days ago, Nothing that is Open source in MySql will be close sourced in the future. They will introduce a few add on backup products that will not be open, none of which exist today. So if you are happy with the current MySql, nothing is going to change. You'll still have full access to the course code you have today and any and all improvements that come in the future.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
First, you have to write code good enough to make it into a redhat distro in order for them to pay you to fix it. Secondly, you have to write enough code for them to just hire you to maintain it for long term profitability in this manner. Thirdly, once someone else writes a replacement package, or cleans up your code base well enough, they get paid by redhat to maintain your code.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Or better yet, depending on how they defined the "lost" revenue (net loss) you could say the following:
Open source creates a net value of $60 billion dollars!
This is $60 billion that is used for other things _while_ retaining the previous value/opportunities/assets.
I keep installing and trying OpenOffice from time to time. I've a veteran user of word processors--I gnawed at the teat of WordStar and GeoWorks Writer, was enamored of AmiPro, put in my time with WordPerfect, and have been using MS Word as long as I have been married (15 years). While I can make my way around just fine, some things either don't work well or are non-intuitive to other members of my family who, admittedly, were reared on MS Word. I just installed the latest version of the OpenOffice Writer to a brand new laptop two weeks ago mostly because I could not find my MS Office XP Pro CDs--I had that installed on my previous laptop. After my most recent experiences, I'll be uninstalling OpenOffice as soon as I find those CDs.
The handling of the scroll speed when doing a click and drag highligh was dreadful. If I stayed on the same page, everything was fine, but if I had to cross a page border, the scrolling would speed up so much that I overshot my mark--by a page or more--almost every time.
When I didn't see an immediate option to edit the header area, and since I've learned the ropes of many word processing programs and have no aversion to searching out features, I found it as an option under "Insert". Sure, I found it, but when my wife had OpenOffice (the full suite) installed on her laptop a few months ago, she didn't find it until after I showed it to her. I don't even find that menu choice intuitive. I assume that the header is already there, hidden from view. I'd expect to view the header, not insert it.
Oh, and if they would like to see OpenOffice used more in an academic setting, they really need to include a control for hanging indents in the paragraph format dialog box.
If saving in ODF, I had no problems at all with formatting, but once I set the default save format to be MS Word XP compatibtle (because one of my grad school profs requires MS Word documents and won't even take RTF), I had problems:
- When re-opening documents saved in the MS Office XP-compatible format, spaces would disappear between words (seemingly) at random. I'd find the problem in a different section of the document each time I opened it.
- I kept losing marks because my papers were, supposedly, not submitted in APA format (something I was careful to do before I sent them in). So, I did what any techie would do--I took a copy of the document to one of my other PCs that still has Office installed, and the document opened with different formatting. All of the first line indents were gone. My hanging indents on the References page were gone, too. That explained the lost points, but I had to wonder "Why?"
I know there are those of you out there who love OpenOffice to death. Good for you. I'm not posting this to rip OpenOffice.org as much to concur about the point that was made about much Open Souce programming not being consumer-friendly. It's certainly a viable option for some, but I found even myself getting frustrated with all of its little quirks and variables. No, I didn't take time to report these annoying issues. I just wanted to get my papers done. Remember that my mindset here--that I did not want to spend time reporting issues because I just wanted to get my work done--is really one of the main things people need to understand about the consumer marketplace. People don't want to learn some new software in order to create documents, they just want to create documents. Whether or not you like it, Microsoft has had a huge influence on the user experience with software. If you want to ensure consumers will have no qualms about your Open Source project (and by "no qualms" I mean that you reduce the chance that they will try you and dump you to near zero), make sure it behaves the way they expect it to behave. To all in the Open Source movement, good luck in making that happen--I wish you all the best. To the OpenOffice.org folks: I'll try you again after the next major release, or in about a year, whichever is first.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Clearly, the more the merrier. It should be obvious at this point in time that 'Trickle-down economics' is a huge darkside lie that only damages an economy and enriches a few.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
So can I get a tax deduction for my PCs? The OS's that are now defunct?
If not, THERE'S NO FECKING AMORTISATION.
But now I should try to install something I've bought, it won't go in. Yet MS still have copyright on it.
I've lost and MS is sitting on it to ensure I STILL PAY.
Sounds like a loss to me.
And a real one.
MySQL is grateful for all code contributions we get, and we will leave all contributions we receive under the GPL as GPL.
The idea is that when you contribute code, you get a better product in return, and everyone gets to see the code that you produced.
forge.mysql.com is a great starting place for contributors.
Marten
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
Now go away.