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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."
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Whenever you pay more than the distribution cost for a piece of software, it is overpriced. Zeros and ones does not cost anything to produce, more than the duplication and transfer cost.
If only I had mod points to bury you to oblivion. It takes considerable time, effort and resources for engineers to design, write and test software. There is no way that paying the bare minimum to cover distribution costs will pay the salaries of everyone involved in developing a product - the zeros and ones don't randomly arrange themselves. Whilst many developers volunteer their time as a hobby, you can't expect everyone to do so.