Yakov Fain's Java Blog: The Open Source Life Cycle Examined

"Up in the sky a bunch of hawks (a.k.a. venture capitalists) are slowly sailing over the sourceforge ready to dive..."

Dec. 31, 2005 12:45 AM

I like free software, especially if it’s legally free. When a bunch of programmers-enthusiasts gather in a basement ( a.k.a. sourceforge.net ) to write some tools for fun, it’s a real open source. Meanwhile, up in the sky a bunch of hawks (a.k.a. venture capitalists) are slowly sailing over the sourceforge ready to dive... Then a tool xyz is getting popular and 50000 people have downloaded it. Creators of xyz start thinking, “Can xyz make us some money?”. At the same time the hawk dives upon the download counter used as bait...

The corporate world ignores xyz for some time, until xyz becomes a household name. It’s a really difficult task for any software to be approved for use in production environment. Meanwhile, up in the sky a bunch of hawks (a.k.a. open source service providers) are slowly sailing over the corporation ready to dive. The corporation wind up with a free software and expensive service, training and support. At the end of the day, production deployment of the open source software is far from being free, but the total cost of ownership is still cheaper comparing to a similar commercial product.

So is this bad? Absolutely not. It’s a win-win situation:

for hawks (they make money)

for corporations (they save money)

for creators of the open source software (they become celebrities, which is exactly why they’ve gathered in the basement in the first place)

for regular developers like you and me (we can download free versions not only of the open source products, but legally free "developer's" (formerly trial) versions of commercial software).

Who is the loser then? The short term loser is the software vendor who’s producing the tool competing with xyz. No worries. First off, they’ve earned enough money in the past reselling the written-once software. Second, instead of selling their software, they’ll make it free and will charge premium for service and support. So they are not losers either.

Next morning, in one of the basements two smart college kids will come up with a new idea (i.e. to make a better and faster search engine). While kids are working on their engine, the hawks are thinking of the proper business model for this tool. The president of the corporation N sleeps well...for another couple of months

Competition rules! Open source rules!

Published Dec. 31, 2005— Reads 16,584 — Feedback 1
Copyright © 2005 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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▪ Yakov Fain's Java Blog: Programmers Started Converting To Java

▪ Yakov Fain's Java Blog: Transit Unions Must Be Banned

▪ Yakov Fain's Java Blog: Peeking Into December 2006

About Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Yakov co-athored the O'Reilly book "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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