A Rebuttal and Reply on “The Very Real Limitations of Open Source”

O’Reilly.net: Dear John: Regarding “The Very Real Limitations
of Open Source”

“First take the many corporations that help subsidize open
source projects by paying programmers to work on open source
software. Look at the many developers employed by companies like
IBM, SGI, Quantum, and RedHat to name just a few. As open source
becomes more pervasive, corporations like the ones I’ve mentioned
will continue to hire open source developers because having them on
staff allows these companies to better compete for very lucrative
service and support contracts. After all, it’s more likely that
I’ll hire IBM to help my organization migrate to JFS because Steve
Best works there.

“Or, look at the success of Marty Roesch (Snort) who landed $2
million worth of venture capital last March, in the middle of a
declining economy. Marty’s company Sourcefire builds on top of his
open source project by offering consulting services and developing
better management tools. While not every OSS developer can secure
that kind of venture capital, that shouldn’t stop anyone from
following the same model by supplementing OSS projects with
consulting and value-added services…”

Complete
Story

ZDNet: Facing the Open Source Firing Squad

“As Vadala noted, IBM maintains a team dedicated to assisting
the Apache project. I have worked with Apache’s SOAP server for
Java, a product originally written by IBM and donated to
Apache.

“I question, however, whether IBM views investment in open
source projects as a profit center. Think about the types of open
source products IBM spends its money on: Apache’s Web server, the
Java SOAP server, and for a time, the Mozilla browser project. I
would categorize these as software ‘plumbing,’ like TCP/IP stacks
are to Web applications. It is base level infrastructure whose
importance is derived from the kinds of software you build on top
of it. Some companies make money from software ‘plumbing,’ but most
don’t (including Microsoft) simply because there is so much of it
already in existence that hoping to sell it would be an exercise in
futility…”

Complete
Story