Same Old Battle, Revisited: Does Open Source Kill Markets?
Yesterday, industry guru Mitch Kapor and his team announced an Open Source initiative to create world-class desktop applications. Their first product, code-named Chandler after the famed detective, is a Personal Information Manager, or PIM. This is an area in which I have a strong personal interest.
The news was only a few hours old before Don Park raised the question of whether such an effort would have negative economic consequences for the software business. Soon after that post, my buddy Chuck Shotton chimed in with a vote dissenting from Park's concern.
Last week while I was at the Online Community Summit in California's Wine Country, I heard the usual "Nobody makes money off Open Source software" whine. The fact is, that isn't necessarily true. There are viable economic models for making money from Open Source. But even if it were true, the presence of a low-end product without BigCo documentation and support will never threaten a viable commercial product.
So I'm with Chuck on this one in large part because it's the side of this debate I've always found myself on. Open Source and/or free software is A Good Thing. It's not a pancea. I choose to use some commercial products where there are decent Open Source equivalents, sometimes because of a key feature I need, sometimes becaue of interoperability concerns with clients and publishers. And there are some Open Source packages I might use if there were any support (even support I had to pay for) available outside the user community. (User support can of course be great but it can also be spotty, inconsistent, and wrong.)
1:00:47 PM 
|
|
