Proprietary drives the software economy

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Couple points

And you are somehow saying that they do not have close contact with customers??? Open source programmers can actually have very close contact with customers. The customers are even reading the source code and helping code at times.

Couple points:

a) JBoss is plumbing code, and makes more sense as an open source product. That's because the interests of the people who contribute align with the end users, since end users are a lot like the contributors.
b) JBoss makes money off of consulting. That means they might well have less of an incentive to do everything they possibly could in JBoss. If they start adding lots of really revolutionary stuff, they basically hand those ideas to everybody else in the world and make very little money from it. Granted, they will innovate to a certain extent, but I don't know if they would be driven as hard as proprietary companies.
c) JBoss makes decent money. How do they compare to BEA? BEA, I think, has far more incentive to push the bar forward with their product due to the financial returns from sales of their product.

JBoss is a credible instance of a company that makes money off of open source. I see some faults, but I think the biggest mistake is to generalize that to all software.

With closed source, a lot of close contact is not possible. The biggest thing is that customers can NOT look at the source code.

As noted, that simply does not apply to consumer-oriented products, though it DOES apply to the lion's share of open source software, as it tends to be oriented at technology types.

Open source does a better job of making software that matters to end users when it's targeted at other programmers. I still think proprietary software has certain advantages, but open source makes better progress in "plumbing code."

And, it is for sure that a cusomer can't just download the software and make it do what he needs, and then offer up the changes for all.

I talk about this point more in part 2 or 3 (can't remember which). No peeking.

Posted by: John Carroll   Posted on: 05/10/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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