Well said.

It is interesting, though, how there actually ARE some business models built around free OSS. Red Hat took Linux with all of the different more or less disconnected bits and pieces and put together a distribution kit that included stable plumbing between all of those bits, and made a nice business out of it. Lesser known OSS stack Hadoop has the same problem of loosely connected software stack modules, and now a company called Cloudera has made a huge business by simply doing the plumbing between the various modules of the stack and putting them together into a simple installation package, for which they can charge a decent fee. Following a slightly different track, IBM has taken Linux under its wing and thrown in a lot of resources to fortify and stabilize it and make it an integral part of its own (paid) offerings.

For us little guys, though, it does make it tough indeed when our potential customers can grab something for free that we expect to be able to charge for. I do believe, though, that the limits of OSS are fast approaching and the ugly seams of many of these "software quilts" are starting to show and tear. A large enterprise today will not make a reflexive investment in OSS just because it is free -- the lessons of spotty or non-existent support, long product update cycles and general sloppiness that often comes with OSS have finally been learned out there. I'm not putting down OSS as a whole, LAMP stack for example is in wide use out there and for a good reason, but the old saying "you got what you paid for" still holds, for the most part.

I've been reading an interesting book on the topic of "free" by Chris Anderson (who also wrote "The Long Tail" a while back.) The book is called, would you believe it, FREE, and you can buy it for $26.99 (sic!) (I got mine at my local library for free <g>) Apparent hypocrisy notwithstanding, it is an interesting riff on the history of Free, how to monetize Free, and the effects Free is having in the global marketplace today. Highly recommended and quite topical for today -- even if you find yourself disagreeing with some of Chris' theories.

Regards,

Pertti

>I love it how so many people spout about how great open source is. In concept sure, but most people MILK it for all it's worth. Do you PARTICIPATE or contribute to the community or are you just a leech that uses the technology and expects it to be free? A lot of people underestimate what a powerful motivator profit is to create something special and useful.
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>I'm not necessarily talking about Microsoft here because we all know that special is the exception rather than the rule there. But I'm talking about smaller developers and shops that have to compete against the often inferior free competition and lose merely on price even though their product is often considerably better. I see people bending over backwards to save $20-$30 registration fees and spending hours searching for something free that doesn't have a fraction of the commercial tools feature set. Idiotic.
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>It bugs me no end that the people who demand the most of FREE technology are usually the ones that contribute the least. Maybe you should make the services you provide your customers Open Source and charge nothing and we'll see how far you'll go... :-}
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>The big problem I have with Open Source is that it devalues people doing software development. If you pay nothing for tools, dev environments etc. you certainly won't pay for add-ons or other useful functionality. And you're making it much harder for someone to build an application trying to get paid for it. While many large OSS projects get sponsored most smaller apps, utilities and tools do not and what you end up with is a model where all sorts of stupid implicit tricks are getting you to buy this or that service or add-on or restriction. Or the small developers get burned out on working for free and the project goes dark. It happens all the time.
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>Nothing is free including OSS and the price is that you have no consistency, support and most importantly no responsibility...
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>And if you think that open source projects cannot be making breaking changes or discontinue an old product - you're dreaming. This is part of the software development process. Things change.
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>Microsofts dropping of VFP was unfortunate, but the writing for it was on the wall 8 years before it happened. Go tell that sad story to Paradox developers. Or dBase developers. Remember Clipper? All gone and they quit while the dbase market was still going strong. Delphi? Same story and there were WAY more Delphi developers than there every were VFP developers... it happens all the time there's nothing unique to Microsoft deciding to let a product fade out.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>Open Source development like with Python, PHP, C , etc are not at the mercy or whims of a corporate giant that might feel the need to manipulate a development language to support their bottom line. Microsoft is really of the old proprietary programming world. The writing is on the wall for the future of software development and it is Open Source.