posted
So, I have noticed there are a fair number of puter heads on this forum and wanted to find out what you guys/gals thought about this whole Open Source thing. Is it a good idea? Do you believe in what it stands for? Do you think that it is a viable business solution? And so on and so forth. Thanks for posting, B34N.
** Edit ** Sorry figured I would add that this was brought on by the fact that I recently watched the Tim Robbins flic "Antitrust" again and was thinking about the whole Microsoft Vista v. Mac Leopard debate and all that jazz.
Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
I'm a total Open Source person and I can say that it's been working out great for me so far. Been on it for about a year now and the more I use it the more I like it.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Good thing, yes. Viable business solution, I don't think so. (I'm not completely sure of this, though - consider a game; you could open-source the code and have people look through it for bugs, but keep the contents, that is, textures, levels, models, etc closed and charge for it.) It's worth pointing out that science essentially works by open-source; people give their best shot at getting a result, then it's vetted by a bunch of other people, and if it passes, the results are free for everyone else to use. But science is externally funded. Then again, back in the day, science was done essentially by rich gentlemen and for-profit universities; it's only since WWII that Big Science has become so expensive that only governments can support it. And a lot of good work was done that way, too - basically, everything before the nuclear bomb, if we look at physics. (Rather less in chemistry, where the commercial applications are more obvious.) So if we look at science for our model, it's quite possible to run an open-source, not-for-profit enterprise for a long time and get good results.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Good thing, yes. Viable business solution, I don't think so.
Yeah, that's kind of my feeling on the whole mess. It is hard to protect your code and still give people a good beta version to test for bugs, I guess that is why you can actually get a job as a game tester now days. But I find out something interesting today, Apple actually uses and endorses Open Source which is that I was told by an IT guy was not the case. They allow programmer free access to all their code but only in tiny bits at a time. I may be incorrect but this is open source yes. Not just beta testing?
Posts: 871 | Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Open-source is a fantastic thing, but a poor business idea as it currently stands. The biggest problem right now isn't coding, but in larger infrastructure projects. In an Open Source shop, who's liable when your ERP crashes and brings your business to a screeching halt?
posted
Isn't Red Hat turning a decent profit? Nothing Microsoft-esque, but nothing inconsequential, either. Sun Microsystems, too.
I love open-source stuff. GAIM, OpenOffice, Firefox, EMule, everything invaluable on the Internet is also the freest -- both in terms of liberty and beer. I love geeks.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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As of two years ago, Sun was turning most of its profit on proprietary software, not open source. I believe this is still true, but don't know for sure.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Open source software forms a substantial part of many business models; less frequently as something sold, but very frequently as part of infrastructure. There are companies out there who will never make any money selling anything related to open source software that depend on software like sendmail, apache, and tomcat.
Also, sometimes it is very hard to quantify the value of open source-related sales. For instance, IBM sells huge quantities of consulting services, often using full or partial open source solutions ("here, run our big expensive IBM application, but you don't have to buy an expensive mainframe, it runs on Linux") -- they're creating value, but not easily quantifiable value.
And while some companies are not making much money on open source software in an absolute sense, the profit/investment ratio can be very favorable.
BTW, Tom, most closed source software I'm aware of has about as much liability guarantee as open source software -- none. Support is a different question, but also more easily remediable by third parties, as is already happening, by companies specializing in certain open source products, the authors of open source products doing a side business as consultants, and third party consultants (who frequently become authors of the open source projects they consult on over time).
More when I have time Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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