There are 2 sides to any transaction. To value a company requires one to know what that company is worth to the buyer. An open source company that makes negative profits could be worth much more than another one that turns a profit if the former one can give the buyer a competitive advantage.
Jboss for instance is very valuable for a linux platform (red hat and possibly novell) but of much less value to IBM being that websphere is a competing product and has a large mkt share in the mkt.
For open source companies where revenues tend to be softer, than their commercial counterparts the value is tied up in intangibles that matter only when considering the buyer.
Even for confidential info - you might be farming it out sonner than you think. Just take the example of credit cards. Given the choice I'd rather pay authorize.net a monthly fee to store my customers credit card numbers because they are better at securing it and I can leverage them to obtain safe harbor from visa by being pci compliant.
Another example is the web based database lightspoke.com. Some customers have been known to store healthcare info bc it's easier to pay loghtspoke.com than it is to make sure all your internal systems are hipaa compliant.
I can't help but think the RIA paid a lot of money for this to happen. How much does the swedish gov really care about tpb?
Re:This Could Be The Worst Thing For KDE
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KDE 4.0 Is Out
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That said, people are still generally more than willing to trade stability for more / better features. Once can say Linux's problems lie in lack of hardware support, lack of 3rd party software, etc. But look at Apple. Apple has been gaining ground - even in businesses. I hate to say it because I'm definitely a function over form guy, but let's face it, it's the oooh ahhh factor of the hardware and OS that has made them as popular as they are today. Make no mistake, this is a giant leap for linux because never before has linux had a generally available ooh ahh desktop that (in time) the average joe can have without going through a lot of trouble.
I had to spend a lot of time a couple years back deciding on a scripting language to use for enabling user defined event based scripting on a major piece of software. In the end, we all unamimously decided on python. Yes, we reviewed ruby, ecmascript and php. But when keeping in mind the ultimate goal was to let amateur pseudo programmers do customized stuff, the decision was an easy one. Python is IMHO one of the most natural feeling languages I've come a cross in a long while. Sure, php is tag based and fits naturally on web pages - but how readable is it? It wasn't even runner up - which by the way was ECMA script. The reason for javascript should be obvious - all web browsers use it. But it is even more difficult and verbose to write in than php. Python feel natural, ends up super readable (completely opposite of perl). So what if it lacks some really geeky constructs that most people don't understand and can't appreciate. So if you point is to empower non-programmers to do something - then python is something to seriously think about. The time is coming where more and more average joes are going to want to script something and when that day comes, the most understandable language will win.
Also don't forget about Jython which may be one of the best glue languages for java and we all know there is a LOT of java out there needing to be glued together!
It's true, linux suffers from having less 3rd part software and hardware vendor support (MS being the favored one here), but the business model remark stems from the assumption that a networked computer today derives it's value in a large part from shrink wrapped software and 3rd party peripherals. Which just isn't true anymore.
Let me ask you this, what was the killer app of the 90's? Email. Do you need 3rd party software to do that?
Now, what is the killer app for this decade? Web (new improved, 2.0 or whatever but no longer the world-wide wait). Do you need 3rd party software to do this?
Sure, power users who use firewire drives, scanners, raid array backups, digital recorders, blackberrys bah blah blah will still balk at linux's dearth of hardware support and advanced 3rd party software. But the other 80% of the world will do just find with a web browser. Heck, even custom databases are on the web now!
So I'd say it was only a business model 10 years ago (which might explain the eMachine debacle).
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There are 2 sides to any transaction. To value a company requires one to know what that company is worth to the buyer. An open source company that makes negative profits could be worth much more than another one that turns a profit if the former one can give the buyer a competitive advantage. Jboss for instance is very valuable for a linux platform (red hat and possibly novell) but of much less value to IBM being that websphere is a competing product and has a large mkt share in the mkt. For open source companies where revenues tend to be softer, than their commercial counterparts the value is tied up in intangibles that matter only when considering the buyer.
Even for confidential info - you might be farming it out sonner than you think. Just take the example of credit cards. Given the choice I'd rather pay authorize.net a monthly fee to store my customers credit card numbers because they are better at securing it and I can leverage them to obtain safe harbor from visa by being pci compliant. Another example is the web based database lightspoke.com. Some customers have been known to store healthcare info bc it's easier to pay loghtspoke.com than it is to make sure all your internal systems are hipaa compliant.
I can't help but think the RIA paid a lot of money for this to happen. How much does the swedish gov really care about tpb?
That said, people are still generally more than willing to trade stability for more / better features. Once can say Linux's problems lie in lack of hardware support, lack of 3rd party software, etc. But look at Apple. Apple has been gaining ground - even in businesses. I hate to say it because I'm definitely a function over form guy, but let's face it, it's the oooh ahhh factor of the hardware and OS that has made them as popular as they are today. Make no mistake, this is a giant leap for linux because never before has linux had a generally available ooh ahh desktop that (in time) the average joe can have without going through a lot of trouble.
Also don't forget about Jython which may be one of the best glue languages for java and we all know there is a LOT of java out there needing to be glued together!
Let me ask you this, what was the killer app of the 90's? Email. Do you need 3rd party software to do that? Now, what is the killer app for this decade? Web (new improved, 2.0 or whatever but no longer the world-wide wait). Do you need 3rd party software to do this?
Sure, power users who use firewire drives, scanners, raid array backups, digital recorders, blackberrys bah blah blah will still balk at linux's dearth of hardware support and advanced 3rd party software. But the other 80% of the world will do just find with a web browser. Heck, even custom databases are on the web now!
So I'd say it was only a business model 10 years ago (which might explain the eMachine debacle).