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Tom Sullivan from InfoWorld reports- Bill Snyder has some advice for Red Hat. Move over, open source ain't what it used to be. "Perhaps the most startling statistic is this: IBM's open source revenue in 2007 was equal to that of Red Hat, the largest and most influential open source company. Not only did IBM equal Red Hat's open source revenue, but the next largest revenue earners were Sun and Oracle," Snyder explains. "The days of the freewheeling open source movement are numbered. Is this bad news for open source? Not at all. Open source software is more than good enough to stand on its own merits, no matter who owns it. And it's about time that the hardworking visionaries of the open source movement were rewarded with good jobs and high returns on their money and sweat." When the FOSS movement was young, it leveraged ideology for self-justification and differentiation from traditional firms. However, profit, not ideology, sustains technical development and business models. As I previously wrote on FOSS reliance on traditional firms and profit motive-...the growth of open source business will continue to rely on integration into traditional commercial value chains of large corporations that appropriate returns from other parts of the chain through proprietary means of return. Open source can be viewed primarily as a means of firms commodotizing industrial markets where they want to reduce the price of inputs, or markets in which they are not competitive. Big money corporate investments in open source makes sense in this context even if the open source revenue stream does not suggest a net gain for the corporate adopter. Consequently, open source has been “unduly romanticized.” It does not change traditional business economics nor signify the displacement of profit motive with altruism on the part of firms like IBM, Intel and Sun. FOSS has always needed firms like IBM, Sun and Oracle. And, apparently without them, FOSS would have a negligible presence in the technology sector.
posted by Noel Le @ 10:07 AM | Free Culture Movement
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