| |||||||||||||
Superior model ? Hardly...Superior model ? Hardly...Posted May 24, 2007 7:20 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733)In reply to: Superior model ? Hardly... by khim Parent article: A day at the Open Source Business Conference
The vast majority of popular proprietary software is also reimplementation of other proprietary products; I think it's just a matter of luck depending on who is in the right place at the right time. But indeed, free software seems to be winning in the long run (or at least that's what I would like to think).
(Log in to post comments)
Superior model ? Hardly... Posted May 24, 2007 8:00 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Some proprietary products are also reimplementations of free products; like IIS from Apache or the Windows NT networking layer (some say directly ripped off BSD). Or version control software from CVS. Or even all Unices from the original AT&T Unix, which followed a model closer in many respects to free software than to proprietary products (patches and distributions) and which resulted in the free BSD.
Superior model ? Hardly... Posted May 24, 2007 17:34 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] Proprietary software does seem to be better are opening up markets, though -- look at, oh, say, video editing software right now. The commercial development houses looked around at the market and could see that consumer video was coming down the pike and going to be a big thing, so they invested the capital up-front to build video editing suites, and it's partly the existence of cheap and usable editing suites that's making it possible for ordinary people to start playing with video and grow the market.
Traditional FOSS development is not at all forward-looking (and it's even a point of pride, for good technical reasons, YAGNI and all that). It wasn't until lots of people had access to hardware and were playing around with it that the itch grew to create free editing software, and so now the free stuff is still way behind the proprietary stuff. It's not clear that the free stuff would exist at all without the proprietary stuff having enabled hardware sales and development.
No reason that commercial investment on speculative markets has equate to proprietary software, though -- they could just as well invest capital up-front in developing a GPLed hunk of software, make money on support, and then when the market picked up ride the influx up new developers right past their competitors. Until that happens, though, this is a particular niche situation where FOSS development has fewer than usual competitive advantages over proprietary stuff.
|
|||||||||||||