As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.
On Open Enterprise blog.
have you seen the latest stupidity from Gene Quinn?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/07/05/open-source-stalls-innovation/id=11506/
@drkoepsell: luckily I saw it thanks to Mike Masnick's fine Fisking:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100706/03220710079.shtml
There's nothing special or amazing about 'open source'.
ReplyDeleteIt's simply what happens when a government doesn't create special anti-technology-sharing privileges such as copyright and doesn't do something so amazingly progress-impeding as to grant patents.
What mystifies me is why so many critics still entertain the possibility that there might just be some peculiar situation in which it would be helpful to mankind's progress to prevent the diffusion of knowledge or the utilisation of technology.
And that's 'helpful to mankind', not just to manufacturers' or governments' wealth and power.
Monopolies can certainly be lucrative to those that have them, but that lucre has to come from somewhere - it is skimmed from the derogated liberty and lost opportunity of everyone else on the planet, i.e. stolen from 7 billion people.