Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Howard Anderson rips open source and shows some common misconceptions about open source:

Let me give you an example. If you are No. 1 or No. 2 in your industry, you hate open source. You make your money by selling proprietary solutions: Microsoft and Cisco. If you are No. 3 to No. 10, you look at open source as a way to get back to those serious RSEUs, because they are where you make money.

As a proprietary #1, you hate open source, because it drives your prices down. Even if it is not feature-equiavlent to your offering, it still can take away a significant part of your user base (those who are happy with a 20%-solution) and, as it has the potential to develop faster can finally disrupt your market.

As Dirk Riehle put it in a recent talk, if you are a number 1 and fear your competitors going open source, go open source yourself. Accordingly if you are not the number one in your market, you can go open source to cut this deficit, reduce costs and reduce prices to attack your competitors. It is very clear economics, with no need for an religion.

Some bold users actually will have open source as part of their master plan; some will find that their smartest, young computer-application designers will migrate here naturally because it is “cool” and they are true believers. They may actually have some open source projects just to keep this next generation happy.

In most cases, these young application designers will not go for open source components because of coolness or because they are true believers, but because they have no other choice. Try to build a modern web application without using open source software and you will fail.

A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.

Another common misconception, is that open source committers are not getting paid for their work on open source projects. At least for high quality community open source projects, e.g. those hosted by the Apache Software Foundation, this is clearly not the case. Most Apache committers are getting paid for their work, needless to say, developers in commercial open source companies like Redhat, MySQL, SugarCRM or Mindquarry are getting paid as well and a study by Roy Fielding has shown that open source committers in fact recieve higher salaries than equally qualified non-committers. Thus it actually pays off to be a committer.

A cynic would be right.

Unfortunately being cynic is not enough, as being objective is a requirement for finding truth. (via Vineet Sinha)