When proprietary companies go open source

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The elephant in the room

Let?s not pretend, though, that it?s a move proprietary companies make when they are successful?which explains the trend.

Yup, that's it -- IBM is a failing company and turned Eclipse loose in desperation.

John, you remain fixated on the model of "software for sale" vs. "software for use." IBM has gotten far more out of turning Eclipse loose than they ever could have from selling it, for at least two reasons:

1) The community improvements to Eclipse have increased its value as a development platform for IBM and IBM's customers, directly driving sales.
2) The broad adoption of Eclipse has increased the availability of applications compatible with IBM's for-sale products, again driving sales.

Similarly, Sun derives value from owning MySQL in at least two ways:

1) The division is profitable. Don't knock it.
2) Sun can guarantee that MySQL's priorities align with Sun's, so that blockers to Sun's sales don't last long. For anyone who's tried to get a large software company to pay attention to a customer's needs, this is huge.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 07/11/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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