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When asked to make a viable business case for the Open Source model, the only proposal any of its fans could come up with was "You give away the software but sell services." That, too, has now been completely discredited; Red Hat may yet just barely survive with that model but no other company I know of has made it work. It remains to be seen just how viable the open source movement itself is, let along as a business model. That's because it's surviving on charity now; essential and expensive services it really requires are being subsidized by money-losing businesses (particularly SourceForge) and that can't go on for much longer. "Open Source" is free only because someone else is paying the bills. How will open source continue if there are no big free high-bandwidth FTP servers out there? It won't die, but without that, progress will slow to a crawl. The real successes of the open source movement are based on the fact that there are places on the web where the distributed collaborators could meet and efficiently exchange their data. Originally they used FTP servers provided by universities, and later by companies. But the days of "information wants to be free" are now obviously gone; it may be that information wants to be free, but bandwidth and storage want to be paid for. In the mean time, profit is back in vogue. (What a strange concept: employees want to be paid.) (discuss) When VA Linux finally bites the big one, it seems to me that the best hope for the open source movement would be for IBM to pick up SourceForge and continue to operate it (at a loss). |
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