Artikel menarik....... http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/funding-open-source/ Supporting an Open-Source Software Products Company with Service Revenues In the year 2010, all enterprise software will be free and open-source. The information system needs of organizations are diverging and packaged solutions are becoming increasingly less viable. The closed-source packaged software products that generated so many billions in profit during the 1970s and 1980s were dependent to a large degree on stable business processes and information system needs. Pressure from the Web revolution pushed IT project schedules from 3 years down to 3 months and closed-source packaged software, with the exception of commoditized standards such as relational database management systems and operating systems, has thus far played an insignificant role in building the new economy. In a world of diverging information system requirements, open source is an unstoppable competitive edge. A closed-source system can only solve those problems that its designers envisioned. When new business processes are developed semi-annually, it is impossible for software that was designed six months earlier to address the new needs. An open-source system won't meet the new business needs out of the box, but it can be rapidly extended for the adopting organization until it works for their specific needs. As information system designs continue to diverge, organizations will become increasingly skeptical about the claims of any software vendor. Instead of vendors getting paid for shipping a CD-ROM that customers start using, enterprise software companies will be paying customers to invest in experimenting with their proposed solution. Where software has become standardized and commoditized, closed source systems are much more effective solutions. However, as hardware becomes ever cheaper the transaction and actual costs of licensing closed-source systems become glaring. In the presence of a well-specified standard, such as the Unix operating system or the SQL language, the revolutionary coordinated distributed programmers method that produced the Linux operating system are extremely effective and eventually will produce an acceptable competitor to closed-source packaged systems. An acceptable, free, and infinitely flexible open-source solution will be an irresistably attractive competitor to a traditional licensed software vendor. We started ArsDigita in the late 1990s, towards the end of a glorious 30-year period in which fabulous wealth was generated from closed-source software products. Conventional wisdom, freely and forcefully offerred to us by a range of industry pundits and venture capitalists, would have been to sell packaged software and hang on to the source code. Our collaborative commerce system, the ArsDigita Community System, would then join the ranks of database-backed systems supporting the Web sites of a handful of Global 2000 companies. As the market shifted toward open source, we'd adapt to making a profit in that market. We rejected this wisdom. Our goal was to build a strong standalone enterprise software company for the Year 2010. We wanted to get very good at inhabiting our adult form and not spend time and effort being successful at a larval stage with closed-source license revenue. Eschewing the easy path necessarily put pressure on us to develop a strong and growing service revenue stream. After all, if the software is free, just how can one make money? This article explains how revolutionary service revenue growth was achieved at Cambridge Technology Partners and how we are doing it at ArsDigita. ............ ............ ............. * Gunadarma Mailing List ----------------------------------------------- * Archives : http://milis-archives.gunadarma.ac.id * Langganan : Kirim Email kosong ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Berhenti : Kirim Email kosong ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
