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Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source
mjasay writes "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors."
Not only that, but these are companies you have actually heard of. Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Google are all companies that produce open source software and actually make money from it. Not to mention pure open source companies like Zope and Zend.
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The paper is freely available for everybody to learn from, in fact the Jan-Feb 2008 issue is fully of very interesting article (what month are we in now?).
No, why would there be [less jobs]?
When you give something away freely, you don't get paid for it. When you don't get paid for it, you don't have a business. When you don't have a business, you don't have employees. If you don't have employees, you don't have jobs.
The simple fact is the software industry must take in the amount it does, to continue paying people what it does. If it takes in less, it must pay fewer people and/or pay each person less. That is, unless there is some other source of funding that I am unaware of (hence my first question. How will it work?)
No, why would [lower wages lead to less graduates/quality]?
With any vocation, there are a few who would pursue it regardless of compensation for pure love of the work. However, the ability to make a good living doing something is a large factor for many. For instance, I majored in computer science over philosophy because I could/did get a high paying job as a result. If software developer ceases to be a high paying job, you will see less people trying to become software developers. Simple economics. Once you have less people doing something, the less likely you are to get that one brilliant person who creates something great.
This isn't fud. This isn't trolling. I simply don't understand the OSS endgame and would like to know.
Somewhat paradoxically, very few programmers actually sell software for a living. What most programmers actually sell is their programming skills. They often sell those skills to a proprietary software vendor, who in turn sells software to the public. However it is just as viable for a programmer to sell programming skills to an open source software vendor, who in turn releases the source code to the public and sells services (support) in that software to the public. One business that does this is IBM ... so their can't be any claim that it isn't a mainstream practice. IBM probably hires more programmers than almost anyone else.
An open source software business will often release software under a "copyleft" type of open source license provisions, so that competitors cannot take it and make it proprietary.
There are estimated to be about 1.5 million programmers in the world who are writing open source software today. By no means are they all unpaid ...
Good point. Most people don't know that for $250 a year you can get Desktop support from Canonical, the company who owns *buntu trademarks. They'll even do engineering for you for a fee.
You have Ivy League Full Time MBA. These tend to make the biggest Jerks of bosses. These Kids think they are special and entitled and tend to treat people under them like dirt while they bring the company to the ground.
Next it is the Ivy League Part TIme MBA. These guys often have real business experience and know what it feels to be the little guy. But being from such a well known school they still often get high end jobs much quicker then their experience shows and still kill the company.
Wow, someone here sure sounds a little frustrated.
You fail to consider that what you call "Ivy League Full Time MBAs" have an average age of 27-28, meaning generally 5-6 years of business experience. Also, given the tough requirements to get in to one of the top 5-10 MBA schools (I'm sure you weren't only referring to Ivies, but also for instance Sloan, Stanford and Kellogg), these are already overachievers by the time they start their MBA. They've already climbed fast, worked their asses off, and gained much more experience than most people. And they're smart.
I'm pretty sure that if graduates from top MBAs consistently ran companies into the ground, companies wouldn't be hiring them, and they wouldn't be top MBA schools anymore.
Let's face it, these guys are either smarter (maybe not in all aspects, but with respect to their work) or more devoted to their work than you are, and that's why they succeed and are paid huge salaries. No need to be bitter.
This space up for sale.
Sigh. You're understanding of the software industry is so pedestrian that it is impossible to have a serious conversation with you.
Those little boxes on the shelves in Walmart are not the software industry. They're not even a significant percentage of it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That's just fragmentation with no benefit to the consumer, just a sea of incompatible layouts, setups, and package management formats.
By listing all these distros like this, you're massively exagerating the fragmentation.
Large numbers of these distros are essentially the same (they share the same repositories, release in virtual lockstep and are effectively 100% software compatable - they just have different artwork and different default package selection - very much like different OEM versions of Windows).
Also, many of these distros are virtually irrelevant in terms of the amount of effort expended on them and the number of users, and thus cannot be significantly detremental to consumers.
Ahh, the great meritocracy of the American Dream. Ignoring race, class, gender (even though you catched it with you 'generic he' usage), nationality and so on and in-linked systems of oppression... priceless, literally.