Giovanni Tirloni wrote:
Personally I'm an open source advocate so any software business model
that is closed will have to try hard to convince me that it's better
than all the community can provide in testing, bug reporting, free
marketing, free support, etc.
You might be an advocate, but have you tried to make money 'doing open
source'? Red Hat makes money essentially by providing a de facto
standard and having got there first so that third party support got
there - and its self-fulfilling then. As consumers, we basically want a
near monopoly (for ubiquity and standardisation) and an also ran to keep
the main player honest.
There are a lot of people with big opinions advocating free software, so
long as someone else pays for it, and takes all the business risk.
Oracle is a successuful business, and what makes it successful is that
it has lots of customers who pay, not lots of advocates who think the
sun shines from you know where.
But if Oracle is exclusively focusing on taking market share from AIX
and HP-UX, perhaps Larry can look at it as a "I have more developers
working on Solaris then you" and disregard the outside contributions
completely.
He has more than Red Hat too, at least in terms of engineers he can
focus and instruct. Lets wait and see what he does with it.
James
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