Everyone loves open source. Everyone being most of the hippies in SoC. Many people don’t. But that is besides the point. It’s being hailed as the next great shift or whatever, many people argue that everything should be open source. I recently ran into a major problem while thinking about this model however.
The bottom line is, proprietary software makes more money than open source. Yes you can sell support licences on top of that, it’s seperate from the product and indeed even Microsoft sell support licences on top of their proprietary products. It doesn’t make the money. Selling the software makes the money. And you can’t do this effectively with GPL open source.
So what, the corporations are just generating huge profits and can lose a bit of money anyway right? Well, take for example office software. Microsoft put $6,000,000,000 into research and development. That’s not just for office but that’s a massive figure - six billion dollars per year go into R&D. That is money spent on making their product better.
Do you think OpenOffice.org are putting those kind of resources in? Of course not, they don’t have those kind of resources. What OpenOffice.org have done is produced a clone, a bad clone, of MS Office. But without the money invested into R&D by Microsoft they wouldn’t have a fantastic office suite to make a clone of. They rely on the investment made by Microsoft in order to clone it for their open source version.
If everything was open source, who is going to be providing these kind of resources?
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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 22nd, 2007 at 12:53 pm
What you say is true of most industries. Take the supermarket industry, if there wasn’t a massive giant in the sector - Tesco in the UK, Wal-Mart in the US - then none of the other, cheaper, supermarkets could survive effectively. If Tesco didn’t plow millions of pounds into improving its business model, there would be nothing for anyone else to copy in terms of logistics, supply, layout and business principle.
I agree that open source software is useful and, in the software market, necessary to keep costs down but as you say it needs an effective and, moreover, dominant “major player” providing the closed source option to make the open source necessary!
March 23rd, 2007 at 1:07 am
Are you forgetting Chris that open source does not mean financially free? One can still charge for a piece of software at point of sale and provide the source along with the binaries……
March 23rd, 2007 at 9:22 am
Yes you can charge at POS but if you’re using GPL anyone else can come along and start allowing people to download it for free once they’ve got it.