Have a look at how Alan Cox has defined the Value , Uniqueness , Need and
Interpretation of the Open Source Movement. have a look
--->http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/AlanCox/AlanCox1.html. For the
Uninitiated, Alan Cox is THE Kernel maintainer. linus Torvaldis, oversees
the code now, Alan Maintains it.
Beginning of article- I am giving only a part of it as copying is illegal!
Shanker
---------------Article Snip>
In the commercial world it is important for companies to reduce risk. One
traditional approach to this is to use commodity parts and to demand
that
vendors work to those standards. In a mature industry there are
standards,
standards bodies and Interworking. If a company like Dell has problems
with a hard disk supplier they shrug and use another one. They are
protected from vendor lock-in and other related risks.
Over the past twenty years the computer hardware industry grew up. It
became a commodity business. The IBM PC and the clones wiped out the
minicomputer industry with ease. To business the case was simple. If
you
buy a minicomputer then the vendor gets to screw you for as much as
they
think you can pay for any upgrades. If you buy a PC you get to dictate
terms to your suppliers.
The minicomputer vendors tried very hard to stop this commodity market
from eating them alive. They called the PC a toy, they claimed it was
only
suited to low end tasks, that it would never be able to replace a real
computer. They were wrong. They were stomped into oblivion by the
power of
competition, volume savings and commodity pricing. [1] You might of
course
recognize the rhetoric. They even published figures of dubious value
showing that minicomputers were so much faster than a PC that the PC
was
dead.
Why is this relevant to Open Source? Well it is the same situation. No
company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy. It would cost
them
more than using commodity components. Just as importantly, it would
commit
them to a single source for support and parts. Why then do they commit
to
a single software supplier?
A closed source strategy exposes the company to serious business risk.
As
many telephony companies have discovered, your OS supplier might
suddenly
decide to be your competitor. It would be naive to think they pay the
same
price internally within the OS supplier that they levy for licensing
in
competitors telephony products. No company can survive with a critical
component totally controlled by a competitor. They will be
systematically
bled of money, and them stomped.
There is also no comeback in a closed source environment. Big name
software vendors fill their licenses with clauses that both deny
anyone
else the right to deal with their software bugs, and deny the right of
the
purchaser to expect problems to be fixed. Absolute power is exercised
over
bug fixing. Are you now a competitor, did your CEO say something
critical
about the vendor? Maybe that is why you can't get a show-stopper bug
fixed.
You may think this is a scare story but unfortunately it is not. Ask
the
companies who committed to Windows NT on the Alpha how they are
feeling
right now. Look at your own Y2K spending and see how much was caused
by
upgrading forced on you because you did not have the rights to fix
just
the Y2K bugs: a cost that would have been happily shared across
thousands
of companies, all of whom could have avoiding upgrading to bleeding
edge
products that demanded much more powerful hardware.
In an Open Source environment the software comes with rights to
modify.
The source code is not actually the important bit. It is a tangible
artifact of the openness. The really important rights are the rights
to
modify and to see the workings of the system. If your vendor doesn't
support you, then the rules of traditional business apply. You go to
their
competitors. If the software doesn't interwork with another package
then
all the information to resolve it is available. You are not locked in
by a
single supplier who refuses to tell you how to interface to a
competitor's
product.
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