An article
in today’s New York Times shows how Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun
Microsystems reveals an inconvenient truth about the open source movement: with
only one exception (Red Hat), free software has proven economically
unsuccessful. Open source companies don’t make money on their own, even by
selling ancillary products and services.
Nor are they apt to make money for the companies who buy them, as Sun
did MySQL and Citrix did XenSource, a virtualization company. Rather than generate cash, these acquisitions
provide technology that would otherwise have to be developed internally over a
much longer time period.
Furthermore, as the article says, “Many
of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in
their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel these
developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the
companies’ strategic objectives.”
Just because the software is “open” --
i.e., open to outside collaboration -- doesn’t mean it has to be free. In fact, the more successful the software the
less free it tends to be. Eventually,
there has to be real money involved (or strategic advantage, which is the same
thing). Simply the opportunity to
contribute is insufficient by itself
This says a lot about successful open
collaboration in general -- with clear parallels to cumulusIQ. For example, rather than a big company (like
IBM or SAP) paying collaborators, our users pay. The collaboration is equally “open,”
however. In fact, you could say it is
even more open since it is clear who is paying.
That’s the same person whose agenda is being served: the user. Other advantages of the “open”
model also apply -- like the freedom to choose from among multiple
collaborators for the best answer to a question.
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