Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion? 384
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue. "MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of 'taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market.' If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."
It'd be nice to see the study... (Score:3, Informative)
Now as for seeing the actual study: The Standish Group's "The Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php [standishgroup.com] for $1,000 per copy.
Non Free Vendors are also Vandals. (Score:1, Informative)
One of the variants of the parable has the glazier paying people to break windows in the first place. Those are more accurate analogies to the non free software world. NDAs for simple things like text formats are a form of vandalism, especially when they are backed up by hardware NDAs, software patents and other nonsense. The whole market is still suffering from mistakes made back in the 1980s and it's a good thing to see the mistake coming to an end. Every dollar saved by free software is one that won't be used to screw you later.
Re:New Math (Score:1, Informative)
I could just as well say that not winning the lottery every week is "costing" me billions a year. Small analyst groups releasing sensationalist reports at $1000 a copy are costing industry far more than open source.
Re:Partial dup? Wasn't the $60B debunked yesterday (Score:3, Informative)
Re:and M$ is a vandal. (Score:3, Informative)
First, you have to write code good enough to make it into a redhat distro in order for them to pay you to fix it. Secondly, you have to write enough code for them to just hire you to maintain it for long term profitability in this manner. Thirdly, once someone else writes a replacement package, or cleans up your code base well enough, they get paid by redhat to maintain your code.
Re:Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be (Score:2, Informative)
Open source creates a net value of $60 billion dollars!
This is $60 billion that is used for other things _while_ retaining the previous value/opportunities/assets.
Re:Open Source actually does have serious problems (Score:3, Informative)
The handling of the scroll speed when doing a click and drag highligh was dreadful. If I stayed on the same page, everything was fine, but if I had to cross a page border, the scrolling would speed up so much that I overshot my mark--by a page or more--almost every time.
When I didn't see an immediate option to edit the header area, and since I've learned the ropes of many word processing programs and have no aversion to searching out features, I found it as an option under "Insert". Sure, I found it, but when my wife had OpenOffice (the full suite) installed on her laptop a few months ago, she didn't find it until after I showed it to her. I don't even find that menu choice intuitive. I assume that the header is already there, hidden from view. I'd expect to view the header, not insert it.
Oh, and if they would like to see OpenOffice used more in an academic setting, they really need to include a control for hanging indents in the paragraph format dialog box.
If saving in ODF, I had no problems at all with formatting, but once I set the default save format to be MS Word XP compatibtle (because one of my grad school profs requires MS Word documents and won't even take RTF), I had problems:
- When re-opening documents saved in the MS Office XP-compatible format, spaces would disappear between words (seemingly) at random. I'd find the problem in a different section of the document each time I opened it.
- I kept losing marks because my papers were, supposedly, not submitted in APA format (something I was careful to do before I sent them in). So, I did what any techie would do--I took a copy of the document to one of my other PCs that still has Office installed, and the document opened with different formatting. All of the first line indents were gone. My hanging indents on the References page were gone, too. That explained the lost points, but I had to wonder "Why?"
I know there are those of you out there who love OpenOffice to death. Good for you. I'm not posting this to rip OpenOffice.org as much to concur about the point that was made about much Open Souce programming not being consumer-friendly. It's certainly a viable option for some, but I found even myself getting frustrated with all of its little quirks and variables. No, I didn't take time to report these annoying issues. I just wanted to get my papers done. Remember that my mindset here--that I did not want to spend time reporting issues because I just wanted to get my work done--is really one of the main things people need to understand about the consumer marketplace. People don't want to learn some new software in order to create documents, they just want to create documents. Whether or not you like it, Microsoft has had a huge influence on the user experience with software. If you want to ensure consumers will have no qualms about your Open Source project (and by "no qualms" I mean that you reduce the chance that they will try you and dump you to near zero), make sure it behaves the way they expect it to behave. To all in the Open Source movement, good luck in making that happen--I wish you all the best. To the OpenOffice.org folks: I'll try you again after the next major release, or in about a year, whichever is first.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:3, Informative)
amortisation? (Score:1, Informative)
If not, THERE'S NO FECKING AMORTISATION.
But now I should try to install something I've bought, it won't go in. Yet MS still have copyright on it.
I've lost and MS is sitting on it to ensure I STILL PAY.
Sounds like a loss to me.
And a real one.
MySQL will not close your code (Score:3, Informative)
The idea is that when you contribute code, you get a better product in return, and everyone gets to see the code that you produced.
forge.mysql.com is a great starting place for contributors.
Marten
Re:and M$ is a vandal. (Score:3, Informative)
Now go away.