Sending the penguins out with a hot foot

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Oracle becoming MS?

Not in every sense of the word, but when you look at the stack Oracle is proposing, it sounds like MS. They're offering the OS, the database, and the applications, and a mixture of open and closed source software (Hmmm. That could be interesting. Licensing hairball, anyone?).

This article reminds me of something Phillip Greenspun said about the open source business model a few years ago: So long as you can offer service more cheaply and efficiently than your customers for your product, you have a potential billion-dollar market. Once you become less efficient than your customers at supporting your product, you're dead.

This case with Oracle is a corollary to that. If your market becomes big enough, competitors will come into it. As long as you're the most efficient at offering service for your own product, you can potentially do very well. If not, you're dead.

He was asked if closed source products were vulnerable to the same thing. He said no, because the originating company owned the source code. True, someone could come out with a clone of your product, but that's a higher barrier of entry.

Oh well, at least Red Hat didn't invest millions of dollars into its software, right?

The moral of the story I guess is, companies that create their own open source niche by creating their own distro are not immune to having their product taken away from them. This means that OSS startups are probably going to be reluctant to spend a lot of money to do innovative things with OSS, because that investment could just go bye-bye if they get too big.

Posted by: Mark Miller   Posted on: 11/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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