Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times) [LWN.net]

Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

Posted Oct 24, 2004 4:13 UTC (Sun) by pellicci (guest, #21392)
Parent article: Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

I think Richard Epstein makes an interesting point: Open Source Software needs to develop a sustainable economic model.

Developers love to do the 'fun' stuff, but few are willing to do the 'grunt' work like writing documentation. Case in point -- there are a number of professionally written manuals for Sun StarOffice, but nothing comparable for OpenOffice. StarOffice costs money, OpenOffice is 'free'.(Thank goodness the StarOffice manuals can be downloaded in .pdf format!) The same is true for Redhat Linux and Fedora -- there are a whole set of professionally written manuals for Redhat, but very little for Fedora. Redhat costs money, Fedora is 'free'.

This situation is not new. In the 'old' days, Tim O'Reilly made a bag full of money producing professional manuals for the various bits'n'pieces of Unix. He seems to be doing very well doing the same thing for Linux. O'Reilly is a business. He isn't writting the manuals and giving them away for nothing. It cost him money. He charges you money. He needs to make some profit to stay in business.

Writing software -- that is to say -- finishing off the less than 'fun' stuff, like de-bugging and documentation usually costs money. And that will require some type of sustainable business model.

While some big Open Source Software projects are self-sustaining, many others rely on the deep pockets of commercial vendors: Fedora (Redhat), OpenOffice (Sun), Eclipse (IBM), Mozilla (AOL).

Smaller Open Source Software companies have tended to rely rather heavily on consulting revenue to fund their development efforts. That model is somewhat limited. To grow large enough to fund and sustain important projects, Open Source Software needs to develop some sustainable business models.

Mike Pellicci
Calgary, Alberta,
CANADA.

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Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

Posted Oct 24, 2004 11:56 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Open Source Software needs to develop a sustainable economic model.

In my view, the reverse is true: sustainable economic models must adapt to Open Source Software. Companies usually associated with closed software development must move to open source and release their wares as Free software.

This is, to a large extent, what is happening right now. It is a good thing that commercial vendors are funding big projects; it means that they are willing to do their part in order to sustain open source projects, since they later benefit from the resulting software.

Furthermore, I think that "open source" and "business model" are mostly orthogonal concepts; one is related to software engineering, the other to economics. There are companies who give away closed software (Winamp's Nullsoft comes to mind), and those that sell Free software (like Red Hat). Only a small portion of pathological business models are precluded from open source development, such as development of undocumented interfaces (as Microsoft with the SMB protocol), formats (office suites) or secret algorithms (as Adobe with PDF encryption and most DRM vendors). Companies in this range are the ones that are truly afraid of open source; the rest are slowly adapting.

Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

Posted Oct 25, 2004 17:09 UTC (Mon) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" Smaller Open Source Software companies have tended to rely rather heavily on consulting revenue to fund their development efforts. That model is somewhat limited. "

That is because they couldn't so far, or they are not trying now, to offer complete solutions, from hardware( drivers problems), the integration ( legacy apllications and MS locks), the software (a good desktop) and support services (lack of quantity professionals)...

Things have developed so that all those areas are falling slowly into line... and everything from doc to debugg will get much better, as soon as commercial interests drop from server/supercomputer into the more everyday/everywhere computer needs.(IMO drivers issues are the more 'inadequate' ones, preventing another explosion of FOSS use.)

That is why articles like the one we are commenting will start to appear more often.