Chris Snook wrote:
Collaborating with the competition ("coopetition") on a common technology platform reduces costs for anyone who chooses to get involved, giving them a collective competitive edge against anyone who doesn't. This is why there is so much industry interest in F/OSS, and mortal enemies in the business world happily work together on technical issues in Linux.
[...]
Your competitors who do participate in the community (and there are a lot in the embedded space) enjoy reduced development costs, more stable and better-reviewed code, continuous compatibility with the latest versions, and influence in the community over the direction of future development. If you want to cede this advantage to your competitors, that's between you and your investors.

I definitely agree that the above is an accurate assessment.

There is a flip side too. For hardware vendors, there is an interesting dynamic of cooperation /and/ competition. Hardware vendors still compete based on features, IP, and many other levels.

A hardware vendor that is unaware of how to compete in an open source world is a hardware vendor with a big fat hole in their business model.

It isn't usually politically correct to state this out loud, but, hardware vendors still compete quite heavily using "closed" intellectual property. With open source, the lines just shift.

        Jeff


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