[ Thanks to snydeq for
this link. ]
“So you want to make a small fortune in open source
software? It’s simple, the joke goes: Just start with a large
fortune. The open source revolution began at least two decades ago,
but businesses and programmers are still struggling to understand
the best way to share wonderful code and pay the mortgage.“There have been some notable successes: Sun paid $1 billion for
MySQL, an eye-popping amount given that MySQL was celebrating
raking in $50 million in revenue not too long before. Red Hat has a
market cap of more than $6 billion.“Yet for all of this wealth, there’s a feeling that these
businesses succeeded by being hybrids. They use the open source
vision to attract users, but their business success comes by
pushing proprietary options. Thus, the dark secret is that their
open source version are merely a form of marketing.”