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 Tech, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.