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Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?
Glyn Moody writes "If open source is such a success, why aren't there any billion-dollar turnover open source companies? A recent briefing by Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, to a group of journalists may provide an answer. Asked why Red Hat wasn't yet a $5 billion company, as he suggested it would be one day, he said getting Red Hat to $5 billion meant 'replacing $50 billion of revenue' currently enjoyed by traditional computer companies. If, as is likely, that's generally true for open source companies, it means they will need to displace around $10 billion of proprietary business in order to achieve a billion-dollar turnover. Few are likely to do that. Perhaps it's time for managers of open source startups to stop chasing the billion-dollar dream. If they don't, they will set unrealistic ambitions for themselves, disappoint their investors, and allow opponents of free software to paint one of its defining successes — saving money — as a failure."
There are almost too many to count when it comes to billion dollar companies involved in open source. They are the main motivator in new Linux kernel development and amongst 100's of other projects including Apache, Perl, MySQL etc you will find @email's from dozens of billion dollar companies in the dev-lists. O'Reilly himself squashed some of these rumors about open source himself over 11 years ago now, so why discuss this? It is just going to turn into a flame war about licenses and corporate responsibility.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
You mean the same multiple open-source side projects that add little to nothing to their bottom line? Google gets it's money from it's proprietary search engine and ad platform.
Why no building dollar bicycle-pump manufacturers? Why no billion-dollar indie record labels? Why no billion-dollar oil companies that have not polluted? Why are there no billion-dollar hockey franchises?
Asking why there are no "billion-dollar" open source companies is kind of stupid. Considering how much of the very fabric of the Internet and the web are open source, I'd suggest that if "open source" disappeared tomorrow, a lot of "billion-dollar" companies wouldn't be worth anywhere near a billion dollars.
This story is the Slashdot equivalent of "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Try asking why are there no billion-dollar companies using 100% CLOSED source software?
The answer is simply because billion dollar companies dabble in a bit of everything. Oracle has a lot of open source products. It also has a lot of closed source products. Same with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc etc. If you don't consider these billion dollar companies to be open source companies then you can't consider them to be a closed source companies either. They all dabble in a bit of both because they are all really big.
And the advantage of this is that customers who call with a problem actually get a useful answer. They're paying for that support, rather than for the license.
Open Source is only 90% cheaper if your time is worth 10%.
Best joke ever.
If I had to rate difficulty of OS maintenance and setup, it would be:
Microsoft (Any), Most difficult
Solaris
Mac OS X
Linux (Any except gentoo), easiest
>>>the software is free, and the company pays for support.
What if I don't need support? That's why Red Hat and other liberated software companies will probably never see 1 billion. Bottom Line: A lot of us are cheapasses. ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
All you have to do is pop-in a CD and install. After that the system usually has everything the user needs (web browser, Microsoft Office, etc).
I don't know where you're getting your Windows CD's but I've never seen one that came with a preinstalled copy of Office. However, practically every copy of Linux comes with OpenOffice.org.
my Linux laptop refuses to execute flash websites (like disney.com or tv.com)
Which Linux? Which Browser? I've never seen Ubuntu fail to install and run Flash and version 6 of the Chrome Browser comes with Flash nowadays.
And I can't get it to talk to my Netscape ISP.
I can't get Windows 7 to talk to my scanner. I'll talk to my scanner manufacturer and you talk to your ISP.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.