Believe me, I'll be thrilled when Linux supplants Windows and conquers the desktop... but the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. The open source commoditization beast ate the database market (digestion takes longer than peristalsis). It's chewing on the operating system.
Guess who's on the plate.
The good news is that the era of market-imposed artificial scarcity of software is coming to an end, and we'll all reap the benefits. The bad news is that Sage's license revenue will disappear along with it. I think that'll take a long time though.
Five years.
So yeah, I love open source and want Linux to win. Never mind that I'm a filthy communist, though - I still like a paycheck, and unless Sage learns to ride the wave and make open source part of its business (like MySQL did), we'll be in Pervasive's position before long.
As will Microsoft.
If you don't think this is cheerful, ask me sometime what I think about information ecology and first contact. When it comes to our relative prospects in a world dominated by open source, call me Pollyanna.
3 comments:
What I don't understand is how the Open Source software market scales into an industry. It MUST, but I don't know how it WORKS. I mean, Ubuntu is a very polished product which obviously represents many manhours of effort. How do these people afford to eat? I'm assuming they all have jobs elsewhere? Are they slouching on their jobs to do their real love? I mean, if EVERYBODY is doing freeware, how are the utility bills getting paid?
Mind you, I'm not complaining, I'm just wondering.
Most of the open-source companies make their money on support. A few still sell the software, but that's not too common since anybody can mirror it for free or pass it along. Support is how Red Hat is profitable, and MySQL too.
Ubuntu is a project of Canonical, which is bankrolled by Mark Shuttleworth (who made his money in Verisign's buyout of Thawte). He says he's willing to keep supporting it for now, but he sees it as having a real business model in the not-too-distant future.
It's not exactly a revolution. Many software companies make more on support activities than they do on licensing - IBM notably, or the place I work. It depends how you define "support" of course, as it can include consulting activities (not just a phone jockey).
Kind of timely, but this piece on boingboing pretty much says exactly what you were saying.
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