“The question is, would replacing Microsoft with another
dominating force actually make things better? It’s a situation
where an ‘Animal Farm’ scenario could be played out in the IT
industry.”
“Microsoft, bad as it can be, does at least provide the
infrastructure that makes its software acceptable for use. This is
something that has been observed and pioneered by Red Hat. “I think
that the business model pioneered by Red Hat truly works,” says
Basson.”
“The open source community needs such a business model
before it can hope to be taken seriously by companies. For the time
being, open source just isn’t at the point where it can take on the
big software companies, and it’s clear that simply replacing closed
source with open source won’t work.”
“As long as the open source community is willing to accept that
it must adopt some of the practices endemic among commercial
software houses, then we should be able to get an industry that
takes the best of both worlds.”