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Rough Type looks at the implications:
It's always been clear that the system [of open source software production] . . . imposes an economic vulnerability on the profit-making companies that engage in it. Those companies have to pay labor costs for developing a free good, a public good that that they have no proprietary control over. Their rivals can reap the fruits of that labor without having to pay for it. That creates, in theory, a dangerous asymmetry in competition. But what hasn't been clear is whether that vulnerability actually matters, whether the danger that exists in theory also exists in reality. Are there economic or other barriers that prevent competitors from capitalizing on the investments of the open-source companies?
We're about to get a lot closer to an answer to that question, thanks to that great clarifying force in the technology business, Larry Ellison. And:
Once open source became a business, rather than a movement, the rules changed. Larry Ellison, whos's nothing if not a non-sentimentalist, understands that, and he doesn't particularly care what "the community" thinks. His attack on Red Hat would never be called neighborly, but it is, as Business Week's Steve Hamm puts it, "a ruthless and brilliant act of capitalism."
posted by James DeLong @ 9:41 AM | Software
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