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Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the good-time-to-be-open-source dept.

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."

3 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Stupid by Pascal+Sartoretti · · Score: 0, Redundant

    And in related news, the oil industry claims that bicycles are costing them 100 B$ a year of lost revenue in the US alone.

  2. This just in... by CODiNE · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Bicycles cost automobile industry $30 BILLION DOLLARS in lost revenue. The damage done by walking is incalculable.

    Remember! If it walks... it's a terrorist.

    --
    Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
  3. Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply by ACMENEWSLLC · · Score: 0, Redundant

    >>Truthfully, the Open Source and Free Software probably hasn't cost proprietary vendors much at all. The people who want to pay for support contracts and warranties still do so.

    Are you kidding? Before Ethereal/Wireshark I paid $5000 for a packet capture package. This was about 12 years ago. We paid for software updates yearly. We had to have this type of software. Now I use Wireshark. That is a loss of revenue to that vendor. In fact, I'm almost certain they are out of business.

    I paid for DNS/DHCP software for Windows from Checkpoint for a few years (they were ports of BIND with GUI interfaces) until I became comfortable enough with *nix to go that route. That's about $10,000 of software and thousands in support. Checkpoint no longer owns META/IP..

    I paid for a proxy server from IBM. Now I use Squid. I don't want to tell you how much a Midrange (not PC) Proxy server costs.

    The point is, I am spending less in software. Thank god & finally. DOS use to be $60. Now Windows Ultimate is $500. IBM PC's were $2000+ in the early 80's. and now I can find them for $199 on the low end. I can buy a PC for less than the OS.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8440