The IT Manager's Journal had an article yesterday on venture capitalists and open source.

In my view, the fundamental problem of open source economics was neatly captured in responses to the piece by two anonymous readers:

NUMBER 1:

"Now, as to customers getting away scott free:

"They can only get away scott free so long as they are willing to hitchhike. Now since we developers are going our way anyway and it does not cost us anything to pick up these hitchhikers (and please note, we are constantly giving each other free rides as well) we are happy to give them a free ride.

"Now, they can't start telling us where and when to pick them up and drop them off and still expect us to do it for free. Now they need to pay for taxi service. Or perhaps get their own vehicle and learn to drive or hire a chauffeur."

NUMBER 2:

"I think you hit the problem right on the head. The problem is that open source creates the software, gives it away for free hoping that the customer picks up the original developers as the chauffeur but then you've got almost free chauffers (aka outsourcing like infosys/wipro) and 'professional chauffers' (aka IBM, Accenture, EDS, HP) then the original developer gets muscled out of the services.

"It's like you're waiting for a taxi, and the original developer show up in a creaky/tiny VW and right behind him is IBM in a flash Mercedes, and behind IBM is Infosys in a 'econo-taxi', more than likely you're passing up on the VW."