[ Thanks to Matt Asay
for this link. ]
“I was surprised, to say the least. I talk with a lot
of enterprises in the course of my business, and open source is
always a primary reason for why they purchase my company’s product,
even if they don’t intend to view or modify source code. The
question I never asked, however, because my company doesn’t offer
proprietary software, is how the buyers would react to proprietary
(“commercial”) components.“From what I heard today, it’s a non-issue. Every CTO that spoke
up (and it was a very open forum) said that they are happy to pay
for proprietary extensions to open-source software, and criticized
pure-play open-source vendors for not providing an obvious,
compelling reason to pay: proprietary bits. (One actually said that
we have built a great financial model…for SIs, not for
ourselves.)”