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 $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."
Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, you should pay attention to the several insightful and interesting comments that followed which point out French Economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window [wikipedia.org].
Whether you hate it or not, it does no good to ignore this contempt that so much of corporate America holds for open source! Take the time to inform your boss or coworker who claims losses directly to open source efforts.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
And to be honest, the latter are a bigger group, since the former is soon to be only M$.
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After all, if my livelyhood depends on fixing problems with my code, what incentive do I have to ship it bug-free to begin with?
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.
ONLY SIXTY BILLION? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:FACT: Open sauce is communism !! (Score:5, Interesting)
The article's terrible economic reasoning is exactly the kind of folly that dooms planned economies. The defense of established interests is cast as defense of the common welfare, and the economy gets gummed up with mandatory crud that is deemed essential even though nobody wants it.
In a market system, companies aren't be allowed to justify their existence through whining. If a software vendor can't offer something that people want to buy, then they serve no economic purpose.
If you think open-source software "costs" the economy money by displacing commercial software, then I suppose you also think it's a straightforward win to ban cheap, superior imported goods so domestic manufacturers can sell inferior, overpriced goods.
Re:FACT: Open sauce is communism !! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that is a pretty amazing achievement, and open source coders and the companies that support them should be congratulated.
That is a massive achievement, open source software it is already saving $60 billion dollars per year, imagine what will be achieved in five years time, savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It would be virtually suicide for companies to stick with the millstone of closed source proprietary software and be stuck with the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes those knuckle heads just forget there are other companies besides M$ and M$'s profits are in reality other companies losses, let alone the 10 to 100 times hundreds factor of using their software even after you have paid for it (well it actually never stop paying for it until you finally crossgrade/upgrade to open source software and start making those billions of dollars of savings ;D).
Re:and M$ is a vandal. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you release a crappy widget with bugs and someone else releases a good widget in which those bugs were repaired, they will eat up your market share. Given the availability of competition in providing/supporting Linux, your suggestion is crazy. The reason the question comes up is because there is no competition for the Windows product (Linux is a different kind of widget in this aspect). While you are correct that Microsoft are not the only commercial vendor, they are the only vendor which can sell Windows. Oracle may have a proprietary database, but it does have to compete with other (now even Open Source) database products. There is nothing keeping other databases from competing, whereas Microsoft can and does effectively stifle operating system competition by being so proprietary. This issue can be applied towards any company that acts like them. Imagine Oracle using some old patent to control SQL and not allow other vendors to incorporate it into their database.
Since Red-Hat as an Open Source vendor do not have control over their code after releasing it (which Microsoft retains), customers are free to find another company to fix those problems. They are also free to move to a competing distribution (an equivalent widget). In the broken window, the vandal is assumed to have a high likelihood of gaining the victim's business, which is clearly not the case with Linux. In addition, the placement of intentional bugs is likely to be noticed and/or otherwise publicized in the community, akin perhaps to the glazier not wearing gloves when he throws rocks at windows (fingerprints). The reward is not worth this risk, since nothing forces customers to stay with Red Hat should this kind of activity be made public.
Thus, Red-Hat has a huge incentive to provide good products and actual support, and also an incentive not to risk its reputation.
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Even if you believe the most likely number of bugs in your code is zero, that is not very different from believing that the number of bugs is higher. You should never act on the belief that your code is bug-free.
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Now go away.
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No, windows and Linux are both OS platforms and are, for the purposes of development, equally open (otherwise no one could write software for either windows or Linux)... Apple begs to differ...
You missed the point. I'm not talking about competition in developing applications for the operating system. I'm talking about developing a replacement operating system which can take
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:4, Funny)
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Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
Code is lost all the time in a proprietary world. Lost long before its usefulness is fulfilled. The end can come in the form of a large corporation buying out the upstart competition, a large corporation trying to keep you on an upgrade treadmill, or a small vendor letting a subpar product with some superb features dying off of natural causes. Regardless of the reason, in a world with open code, the community has the ability to retain good code. The closed world has an incentive to make sure your Windows all get broken on a periodic basis.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If Windows 3.1 gets thrown away because Windows 95 is on the scene, and you have to spend another $100 for the same functionality, something was most definitely lost.
I think you are confusing amortization with actual economic loss. Of course anybody can always choose to destroy property (or even burn money), but this is a tangent to the overall argument. If you buy a faulty product then this may, overall, lead to loss but this is not inherently a 'loss' (you are gaining a faulty product after all. Deal with it.)
I do sympathize with your arguments.
Best regards,
UTW
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest economic difference is that thousands or tens of thousands of businesses that never would have had a chance to start or that would have started deep in debt are now running software they didn't have to borrow to buy. People are running businesses on software in which they've made little or no investment above the cost of the hardware on which to run it.
These people are loosening the labor market since they're not working for someone else any longer. They pay rents for office space, they need accountants either on staff or on a consulting basis, they need business insurance and legal advice, and they advertise. These are expenses they never had while they were employed elsewhere, and those companies that get paid for rent or for legal, marketing, accounting, or insurance services make more money.
What's better in the long run? Is it better for a few dozen big and a few hundred small software vendors to make the money and grow bigger, or is it better for the money to be spread out among tens of thousands of businesses in thousands of communities?
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know which is better economically, and I don't care. What I do know is that the latter scenario describes a more interesting world that I'd be happier about living in - that means more to me than any reasonable amount of money.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you kidding? Before Ethereal/Wireshark I paid $5000 for a packet capture package. This was about 12 years ago. We paid for software updates yearly. We had to have this type of software. Now I use Wireshark. That is a loss of revenue to that vendor. In fact, I'm almost certain they are out of business.
I paid for DNS/DHCP software for Windows from Checkpoint for a few years (they were ports of BIND with GUI interfaces) until I became comfortable enough with *nix to go that route. That's about $10,000 of software and thousands in support. Checkpoint no longer owns META/IP..
I paid for a proxy server from IBM. Now I use Squid. I don't want to tell you how much a Midrange (not PC) Proxy server costs.
The point is, I am spending less in software. Thank god & finally. DOS use to be $60. Now Windows Ultimate is $500. IBM PC's were $2000+ in the early 80's. and now I can find them for $199 on the low end. I can buy a PC for less than the OS.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8440 [zdnet.com]
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Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH, we have companies like Starbucks and Yum! Brands that give us monotonous flavor from sea to shining sea in lots of little locations. Markets like that would probably be better served by locally owned restaurants, but most Americans seem to like predictability.
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1: tastes reasonable, not the worlds nicest but perfectly acceptable.
2: will fill me up
3: comes at an acceptable price.
4: won't give me food poisoning.
Sure a local place may be better than mcdonalds, equally it may be terrible. When you are already tired and worn out and in an unfamiliar place do you really want to risk having to eat a horrible meal or spend yet more time and money going somewhere else?
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. The question, in many cases, isn't buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, it's buying vs not buying. This seems to be using the same flawed reasoning that the BSA and RIAA use in estimating their losses due to piracy - that every instance of piracy translates directly into a lost sale. In this case, they seem to be assuming that every use of OSS translates to a lost sale of proprietary software. That simply isn't the case. How many businesses would make do with, say, Microsoft Access (which they likely already have) if they couldn't install MySQL or Postgresql rather than pay the thousands of dollars to buy Sql Server or Oracle?
Re:Broken Window Fallacy doesn't apply (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nothing is being destroyed, so the question isn't one of having to buy something vs not having to buy it.
The broken window fallacy isn't about breaking things, it's about not taking into account hidden costs. It's perfectly applicable to the situation, as the money NOT going into buying non-OSS software goes into something else (that produces more value).
The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is ficti
Oh, it applies. (Score:3, Insightful)
In this story, the proprietary vendors are the glaziers. The glazier may indeed lose business, but it is no cost to the economy as a whole, and it is a benefit to the shopkeeper, who can now spend money on things other than software.
It's all in the spin... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all in the spin... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but it is creating some fantastic zero-cost startups. How many small companies start with no investment at all on a few copies of eclipse, mySQL and a few other free products when their alternative is to either steal or pay licensing fees they can't afford?
It must be hard coming up for excuses for your stupid stagnant products when free Open Source products are beating them in every way.
I guess the only alternative is to start spreading some kind of FUD and try to get Open Source declared un-american or something. Maybe you could start out by buying a few articles in tech mags and somehow trying come up with some twisted view of it that might make it sound bad...
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Re:It's all in the spin... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who can argue with that. Maybe that remaining 7 billion can be spent on curing cancer, or building a working fusion reactor instead of wastefully tossing it into an industry that apparently can't compete with 'inferior' offerings by open source purveyors.
Re:It's all in the spin... (Score:4, Insightful)
The wealthiest participants were determined to break the natural function of a marketplace to protect their own interests, and managed through their success to drive most of the talent into the "white market" of non-purchase goods, where at least some shelter exists from strong-arm market manipulation.
I tend to refer to this kind of financial post hoc as an "entitlement benchmark".
"If things had continued to go as we rigged them to go, maximizing our own benefit with no foresight or consideration for unintended effects, and the peons we squashed had remained powerless to get uppity about this state of affairs, we would have enjoyed another $60b/year in revenues by now."
Well, good for you. Aren't you the same geniuses who collapsed the Grand Banks fisheries, and pumped the Ogallala aquifer dry?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer [wikipedia.org]
Maybe its a good think that markets don't travel in the straight lines these projections presume.
If there hadn't been any alternatives, the Edsel would have been one of the best sellers of all time. What would that prove? Only that you can paint a goose red, white, and blue, and capitalists among us will still wring its neck to upgrade from wealth into shameful excess.
Re:It's all in the spin... (Score:4, Insightful)
The initial investment in proprietary software can be thousands of dollars or millions of dollars to start a business, depending on business type and scale. Both have ongoing costs. Which is more likely to save money, if ongoing support costs are comparable? Which is a small startup more likely to be able to finance?
Well then... (Score:3, Interesting)
That wasn't hard, was it?
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
With open source software there is no overall economic loss, but instead there are economic gains (assuming this open source software is in fact free of financial restrictions). The economic gains are seen (at the least) from the adoption and use of this software from people that could not or would not otherwise use such software; and so the standard of living (and quality of living) goes up overall throughout the population. The only downsides are that closed source software has competition (and competition is never a bad thing).
Open source software (as with all things that are added to the 'market') creates wealth; the difference being that with closed source proprietary software this wealth is more concentrated (within the company that creates the software and the customers who successfully exploit this software for their own ends), whereas with FLOSS this wealth is (or at least has the capability of being) distributed more broadly throughout the population. Of course I'm not talking about 'wealth' from a purely monetary perspective, but from the economic perspective as wealth being a 'good' or a 'service'.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard example I've seen in economics classes is that if you pay for a tow company to come boost your car, you gain benefit from it, and this is reflected in the GDP (a monetary index of the quality of life... sorta). If instead, you get a boost from your neighbour, you also benefit, but the GDP does not increase.
This doesn't mean that paying for a service improves the national quality of life more than getting it for free. It simply means that money is a poor means by which to measure the quality of life.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Interesting)
The fallacy in this case compares to this; copyright in combination with proprietary software forces people to pay for something they otherwise would not have to (breaks the window) (note that this applies to the current discussion when we're actually talking about OSS replacing proprietary software, but it is also appropriate when considering forced upgrades (but less when we're talking of proprietary software without replacements)). This creates a revenue stream, measured economic activity, for some vendors (window makers). When one engages in this fallacy one disregards that the cost came from somewhere; the people paying for the software when they were _satisfied with the previous version (free) or free version (also free)_.
When they pay to replace something they were happy with they lack the funds to pay for more pots or pans, meaning someone else is losing the economic activity elsewhere, activity that would have created _new_ wealth.
goes up overall throughout the population.
That effect is more appropriately compared to the deadweight loss of monopoly pricing tho (revenue is maximized at a price level where some consumers are deliberately priced out of the market, but due to lack of competition, far, far above competetive price per unit).
Combine the broken window fallacy and monopoly pricing and you can come up with fairly huge theoretical numbers that intellectual monopolies cost society. One could easily come up with calculations supporting indications that a quite significant percentage of GDP is lost.
DANGER! CAR ANALOGY! (Score:4, Interesting)
Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because the glazier makes out well, people assume the economy is healthy.
However, their customers would have spent the money elsewhere if their windows were intact, spreading the wealth further and encouraging more creation.
Because Microsoft makes money, people assume the economy is healthy.
Microsoft, like the glazier, fixes the apparent problem (lack of w/Windows) but because it's a tax on computer usage, tends to slow down adoption and thus the economy.
FOSS really is more
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Free Software is just a reflection of the economic reality that creating ideas is more valuable than duplicating them.
Re:Non Free Vendors are also Vandals. (Score:4, Funny)
A real horror story for business (Score:5, Funny)
I often wonder how many billions all the free high-quality insight and advice that we give out here at Slashdot costs consultants in lost revenue.
Creation of Wealth (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source software is, by any reasonable definition, valuable. The individual programs are useful products that people want. Their existence makes the community (in this case, the whole planet) more wealthy. Therefore, open source is not the value-sink that its competitors would dress it up as being.
Re:Broken Window Fallacy (Score:5, Interesting)
OSS from my experience only works in mature marketplaces. Meaning, you do not see OSS products going after fast moving software products such as Solidworks, etc... You only see it in mature slow moving companies... Meaning, OSS is just capitalism at work.
The Fallacy Fallacy (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth is that cost often determines whether something gets purchased at all. If new cars are too expensive, people will make their existing cars last a year or two longer. (Or not replace their horse-and-buggy with a car, an insight that made Henry Ford rich.) People didn't even see the need for a personal computer until they became cheap enough for everybody to afford one. And if upgrading its IT is too expensive, a company will very likely make do with its existing IT.
Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
VP-speak is annyong. "Costing??" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not costing anything. It's competing. Very effectively, I might add.
In the same frame of mind, I'd be curious to know if this group also considers IT a "liability."
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
So to rephrase it: "Bitch, lookit them open source punks givin' it away fo' free! That's mah market segment, nigga! Damn, it's hard out there for a closed-source proprietary software company."
"Revenue" (Score:5, Interesting)
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To be fair, I think that's a much safer assumption in this case than it is for music. Music is a luxury good, while word processors (and most other open source software) aren't.
That said, all this latest round of petty bitching really amounts to is, "People are spending money on other goods and resources, when they clearly should be spending
In the end (Score:2, Insightful)
pathetic (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pathetic.
Oh, my God, we need more Microsoft programmers.
Oh, my God, we need more h1b visa workers.
Oh, my God, the programmers we displaced are competing with us and winning.
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Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly (Score:2)
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done
muahaha... my brilliant plan should be killing MS any minute now...
Wheelchair industry (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wheelchair industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Genius plot.
Partial dup? Wasn't the $60B debunked yesterday? (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
New Math (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, let's make a law that outlaws open source software, to "protect" the "traditional" software industry. At the same time it will fight terrorism (because terrorists use open source software) and help the children (because open source is BAD). Yes you sarcasm impaired mods, learn to spot it when you see it.
Re:New Math (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the presumptions I find most distasteful is the presumption that proprietary/commercial software vendors are somehow entitled to income from sales. I have issues with such business models in the first place. I don't believe they are entitled any more than I am entitled to a paycheck simply because I offer my services to the highest bidder as an employee. I get paid when I do work.
F/OSS doesn't "cost" other business money and doesn't cause losses any more than natural competition between commercial competitors causes loss or "costs" a business its 'entitled income.'
The slant of the statement is against F/OSS, but it's making a terrible argument against it.
Among the things I like about F/OSS is that 'providers' of such are offering service and assistance to support the use of software they do not control. The user is in control which means there's no vendor lock-in and less incentive for the vendor to abuse the customer. This creates a business model where the vendor will actually have to WORK or offer something of value to the customer. In the case of commercial software vendors, the incentive is to do as little as possible and to guarantee NOTHING (read a EULA).
What F/OSS does is cause competition that is hard for proprietary/commercial vendors to beat. That's "competition" and not a "cost" or a "loss."
COMPLETELY 100% WRONG (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that the local bands selling their CDs for five bucks apiece is costing the RIAA labels tons of money too. Know ahet? I consider it a GOOD thing.
I also consider it a GOOD thing that free software "costs" Microsoft money. Because, you know, I hate their software, I hate their business methods, and frankly I don't care too much for Gates and Ballmer.
Your bad is my good. Costing you? Well GOOD! Well done, FOSS! Here's to you kind sirs!
A $60 billion double-edged sword. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can take that exact same stat, and say that it's given businesses a $60 billion saving. Just think how much more competitive our businesses are now that they're saving all that money!
So you see, it's a double-edged sword: a cost to one person is a saving to another.
The fact is that when you start talking about that sort of money, it's never actually as clear-cut as a single statistic can make it sound. Anyone who does try to boil it down to a simplistic headline like that is almost certainly trying to put their own spin on it. (and yes, that includes me)
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.
How many businesses has it allowed though (Score:2)
ebay? Amazon? Google? Redhat? IBM? Many other shops gain efficiency from using Opensource (certainly in finance and healthcare).
Or to make a bad car analogy: How many billions in buggy whip manufacturers or buggy makers were lost to the automobile? hmmm? Or is the efficiency of the car a net gain on the horse drawn carriage?
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interesting when compared to the production cost (Score:2)
when the report says that this costs the vendors about 60GigaDollar/year it just shows how extremly inefficient comercial production in the capitalist system is.
mond.
They have only themselves to blame... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.
Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD, [freebsd.org] Apache, [apache.org] and Postfix, [postfix.org] to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence [bluefeathertech.com] off the ground.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop [bpsoft.com] is, I think, a great example.
If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.
Happy tweaking.
Not only the software vendors are suffering. (Score:5, Funny)
And how much...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Another Fallacy (Score:5, Interesting)
That's simply not true.
For example, I can download Apache Derby for free and have a SQL engine for my various projects. Had Derby and MySQL and the like not been available, I wouldn't go out and buy a SQL product--chances are, I'd home grow my own custom database. For many of my projects SQL is overkill, but because its free, I may as well use SQL than a couple of fixed-width flat files--even though fixed-width flat files would probably work just fine.
Back in the 80's I knew a fellow who collected pirated software. He never used the software--he just collected it because he thought it was cool. Realistically, had it been impossible for him to collect software he would have never bothered. So realistically speaking while he had thousands of dollars of pirated software on his computer, because he never used it or had any need for the software he copied (it was just a weird hobby of his), he would never buy the software even if it was impossible for him to otherwise obtain copies. So he never represented a sale to the software makers whose wares he was copying.
One also has to wonder what economic benefit has arisen from FOSS. While its true that, for example, I'd hate to go into the database business--it's a complicated business and there is no money to be made because of MySQL and Derby and other free database engines out there--end-user applications seem to be thriving. "Infrastructure" software--stuff like databases and web servers and the like have become free, and going into a business to sell a $10k software solution to compete against Apache Tomcat would be silly. But on the other hand, how much value has been built on top of that infrastructure that simply wouldn't exist if that infrastructure was expensive and the barrier to entry high?
Somebody would have written it (Score:2)
Somebody would have written a free-ish SQL had not the likes of MySQL been available. FOSS developers aren't really good innovators(*) but they are darned good engineers and implementors and somewhere out there, somebody will be making what starts as a free clone of some sort of a popular RDBMS, and then evolves its own philosophy.
(*) By that, I mean, FOSS people aren't going to come up with some literary vision of computing, but, once they have a spec, t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
rehashes of someone else's idea. They're cloned or bought from others who may or
may not have had any part in "innovation" either.
Innovation is just a buzzword used to sell pointless upgrades and justify
uncivilized business practices.
Let the market decide (Score:2)
The main point is that it provides an alternative. So far as industry goes, the lifetime cost has nothing to do with the purchase price, it's embedded in the need for support, the cost of making changes, training (whether explicit, or implicit) and the platforms needed to run it over the software's life.
For these reasons the choice to go with software they can download for free, as oppo
The figure is merely a testament to value (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, it is making the overall market more efficient. That's just Economics 101.
For those who try to spin this as some sort of problem, can you imagine if a single company owned a patent granting them exclusive rights to produce what Apache provides for free? The gains to said company would pale in comparison to the astronomical loss to the overall marketplace.
It's more of that MBA / Marketing math (Score:2)
It is, after all a free market. Consumers are free to judge the competing products on their merits and those consumers are selecting open source products more and more. This is what competition is all about, right? So if those traditional software companies would like to remain competitive they'd better get busy and develop products that suit the market's desire.
Those traditional software co
Good. (Score:2)
I'd rather the big boys were competing with $0 than within 10% of "what we choose to charge".
I love my OSX but I want Ubuntu etc. breathing down the necks of Mac and Win. I'll either switch at some point or get a better functionality or value in an OS out of one of those.
In other news ... (Score:3, Insightful)
- Healthy Food is Costing McDonalds $4.2 Trillion.
- Singing is Costing RIAA $5.4 Quadrillion.
- Islam is Costing Jack Daniels $43 Billion.
- You not Giving Me You Money is Costing Me $120.000.
You name it
In related news... (Score:3, Funny)
cost of the alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
Costing == Saving (Score:3, Insightful)
But consider therefore, that it's saving customers 60 billion and possibly a lot more (less costly for customers to maintain license compliance etc).
Thats silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously... thats silly. Open Source just diversify the market. Instead of SQL Server and Oracle saturating the market with a poorly suited solution, you have PostgreSQL and MySQL (and more) catering to a segment of the market which doesn't require SQL Server and Oracle, and let the big names (I use those 2, there's more) commercial ones fill up the rest of the market, or force them to add more value (for example, ETL, Datawarehouseing, etc) by making basic feature a commodity (if all you need is flat tables to run SQL on, you don't need Oracle).
So really, Free Software isn't taking money from anyone... they just force market expension. If free databases didn't exist, the commercial databases would have less features than now, and going after a smaller niche, to sell probably exactly the same amount of licenses as they are selling now.
In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
$10b db market ... in price maybe, not value (Score:3, Insightful)
A company moving from Oracle to MySQL should have its head examined.
On the other hand without MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, Oracle and MSSQLServer could have far higher licensing costs that aren't actually a fair reflection of their value to the market. Oracle is still a stupidly high price, but there is OracleXE now.
It's survival of the fittest. Database costs were so high in the past, people felt it necessary to write alternatives, and over time those alternatives improved to be competitive because there was such a demand. This means that the market was never $10b in value, only in price for a short time until the unsustainable price created competition that brought the market down to its true value.
Oh, i'm wittering here now and someone who's studied finance and business will shoot me down anyway.
Contradictory argument's from proprietary side (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is it?
Hubris (Score:3, Insightful)
Alternative Title (Score:3, Funny)
$60 billion? That's nothing! (Score:3, Insightful)
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