> I went to a developer conference in England (Raymond was one of the > speakers) this past spring. The thing that struck me is: > > 1) they are hot, hot, hot about open source as a way to one up the US.
Possibly true, but who can blame someone for wanting to edge out others in competition...? The results, assuming this is true, will benefit everybody... > > 2) Almost everybody there, except those working in finance, were working > on government projects. Open Source is great for government projects, but > I think our strength comes from the innovation of the private sector. > Financial reward is vital. Very much true in the past, and in the current outside of the software sector. What I think we're really seeing here is a commoditization of software and the software development process. Three big market pressures acting against existing proprietary software: a) As always in the past, new tools allow you to rewrite your old project, which took you two years to develop, in two months, this is nothing new, but still contributes to commoditization b) Additional resources are being brought into the market, namely India (for the most part) and China (less so). This cheap development labor has placed a downward pressure on proprietary software prices c) Open source projects have been gaining acceptance, both in the government space and in the private sector (yes, including *many* financial institutions, heck, Instinet runs a large portion of nasdaq trades on PDP-11 emulators running on linux). The hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of webservers on the internet running linux/apache/what not are testament to the effect they can have on the OS market. In this case, it's dramatically expanding a market that would otherwise be occupied by a much smaller market of traditional web servers etc... > > My feeling is that Europe is embracing a socialistic model of software > development. I don't think this is the right model for the US, and we > should look at both the technical merits AND the business achievements > that have come out of the European model. I have done this myself. > Almost all Linux users I talk to about my proxy ask, "why don't you Open > Source it." Because I want a fighting chance of making a buck on my work. > It would be difficult for me to compete against the likes of Red Hat, who > would gladly take my work and sell to IBM themselves. > I'm struggling with this myself. Personally, I want to open source as much of my code as possible. I am/will be relying on it for income, so it's a scary prospect to open source it. As we start to make more sales, I'm thinking of implementing some sort of policy where we'll automatically open source code that is older than X. Yeah.. wouldn't pass the RMS test.. but I'm not as interested in pleasing RMS as I am contributing to the body of OS work, particularly since we rely heavily on OS technologies... _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
