Although Rich does not appear to get OSS Devs. It seems to me that OSS Developers are compensated in a number of ways for their efforts including recognition, enjoyment, education and even getting paid real cash. OSS developers sometimes get wealthy by targeting a market, creating SW for it and delivering on a solid product. JBoss comes to mind. The business and development models work and have been around longer than Sun.
What appears to be hidden in these comments is that the OSS model is unsustainable because the SW Developer is not compensated for *all* uses of his/her SW - even unintended ones. That the developer is not getting all of the potential value from what s/he created. This is fundamentally the trade-off one makes with open source SW. You give up ownership over all potential markets. In trade you get to leverage existing code to build solutions for your target market (be it you, your friends or the Fortune 500) and potentially additional volume for your SW as others extend the use of your SW into new markets. OSS is an especially powerful technique for people marketing a "platform" who desire volume and third party value add (applications, drivers, etc).
This is wonderful for consumers of software. It engenders competition and mitigates the possibility of a monopolist owning the market. OSS is not going away.
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Although Rich does not appear to get OSS Devs. It seems to me that OSS Developers are compensated in a number of ways for their efforts including recognition, enjoyment, education and even getting paid real cash. OSS developers sometimes get wealthy by targeting a market, creating SW for it and delivering on a solid product. JBoss comes to mind. The business and development models work and have been around longer than Sun. What appears to be hidden in these comments is that the OSS model is unsustainable because the SW Developer is not compensated for *all* uses of his/her SW - even unintended ones. That the developer is not getting all of the potential value from what s/he created. This is fundamentally the trade-off one makes with open source SW. You give up ownership over all potential markets. In trade you get to leverage existing code to build solutions for your target market (be it you, your friends or the Fortune 500) and potentially additional volume for your SW as others extend the use of your SW into new markets. OSS is an especially powerful technique for people marketing a "platform" who desire volume and third party value add (applications, drivers, etc). This is wonderful for consumers of software. It engenders competition and mitigates the possibility of a monopolist owning the market. OSS is not going away.