It is evident open-source software has and will continue to impact the software industry and the business models of new and existing companies, as both start-ups and large entrenched players vie to keep ahead of open-source projects. For instance, Marc Fleury’s JBoss came out of the blocks as a poster child for the open-source movement.
It doesn’t matter what business model a given company is using the end result is how much revenue is generated. It all fine and nice to believe that your project is contributing something back to mankind and OSS until you wake up one day and realize that you don’t have any money to buy food.
While true, sometimes it’s as easy as having a way for people to pay you. If you offer support for OSS and you do not have a simple way for people to pay you — even for a ‘boxed set’ — you are missing out on a chance for quite a bit of revenue.
I can count about 6 times over the last couple years that if I could ‘buy a copy’ of a program that was OSS I could deploy it — but since there was no way to buy it I was told ‘do not use freeware’. (Very frustrated on this as my explanations that it wasn’t freeware were ignored.)
Also, keep in mind that OSS, unlike Free Software, focuses on source availability and not price. While you can charge for both, and in many specific cases they are the same, they are not necessarily the same. You can restrict redistribution or use of OSS (for example, requiring all servers to be licenced for support on any of them) while Free Software folks see this as at a minimum a unfavorable act if not a violation.
> I can count about 6 times over the last couple years
> that if I could ‘buy a copy’ of a program that was OSS
> I could deploy it — but since there was no way to buy
> it I was told ‘do not use freeware’. (Very frustrated
> on this as my explanations that it wasn’t freeware were
> ignored.)
I assume your boss told you so, but why didn’t you simply buy it anyway? I’m sure the maintainers of those OSS projects wouldn’t refuse selling the software to you (after explaining them why you can’t use the free download).
I assume your boss told you so, but why didn’t you simply buy it anyway? I’m sure the maintainers of those OSS projects wouldn’t refuse selling the software to you (after explaining them why you can’t use the free download).
No order page. Period. If the boss can’t order it. … If purchasing can’t order it. … It’s not for sale. If it’s not for sale, it can’t be used since it’s not a product and is ‘unprofessional freeware’. (Note: I do not subscribe to this line of reasoning. I’m just relaying it here as an explanation of how others think.)
Note that having it bundled with a for-sale OS distribution only adds to the complexity since the distribution may or may not be on the approved list. Also, if the boss wants to use it under Windows there has to be a packaged Windows release.
Anoter side note: I almost deployed this program;
http://dcl.sourceforge.net
Not being able to buy a boxed copy was not an issue. Guess what killed it for management (not my boss, my boss’s boss)?
I guess support contracts don’t bring in any money. So taking that into consideration:
1) MS, Sun, Red Hat, Dell should just cancel all those so called non-lucrative contracts right now.
2) Companies do pay for added features to software. Well, I guess that won’t bring in any money.
3) I guess consulting services won’t bring in any money.
4) We cannot forget the pay as you go support calls: call MS for help, they ask for a credit card before they answer a question. They cannot be making any money.
Hell, everyone in IT should just give up since all jobs are getting moved to other countries.
So the largest OS companies are Redhat and …???
MySQL is still running on venture capital. JBOSS is a small private company now competing against IBM.
In the article it mentioned that the reason corporate America adopts OS is not because a) OS is cool, b) Microsoft is evil, c) OS has great support, but d) it saves them money because someone else does lots of work for free.
It’s sad to think that OS is mostly driven by ideological young men working lots of extra hours. It certainly isn’t driven by Os making any money. And its sad to think that an over abundance of OS talent and source code could actually be putting other developers out of work. Too much supply leads to too little demand.
OS is not a key player in business models, this is just hype. Show me the money.
OS is not a key player in business models, this is just hype. Show me the money.
What’s OS? Are you refering to something specifically? (A project, product, or a method like waterfall or SCRUM?)