News.Com Open-source approach fades in tough times

"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."

"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."

"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."

winterspeak.com Interview with Sleepycat President and CEO, Michael Olson

"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."

Andre Durand Commercially OPEN for Business

"I love open source. I love what it stands for and I love the fact that as a connected society we've perfected the concepts surrounding 'division of labor' to such a degree that we're now afforded both the luxuries and opportunity to do what we want for the sheer enjoyment of it, even if that means coding into the wee hours of the night! I love business, I love creating them and working with people to run and fine-tune them. I especially love making money, whether it be for business, myself or others. Money has afforded me the freedom to pursue my other passions in life: travel, thinking, writing, creating and oh yea, partying! Most of all, I love it when I get to put all my loves together... all at the same time!

Must all mis amores live separate lives? Can't they just get along? I think they can. I think they will."

The Tech Stallman to Receive $830K: Takeda Award Promotes Open Computing

"Software pioneer and MIT research affiliate Richard M. Stallman has been named as a co-winner of the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being."

"Stallman has been recognized for his work leading the GNU operating system development project, and for starting the free software movement. GNU is an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix,” a reference to the fact that the popular Linux operating systems actually operate off of GNU."

"Stallman hopes that software companies will eventually shift their source of income to custom software, support, and custom installations rather than proprietary software. “It is not impossible to make money from free software,” Stallman said."

IBM developerWorks Interview: The Eclipse code donation

"On November 5, 2001, IBM announced its donation of $40 million worth of tools to the Eclipse project. Eclipse, a fully functional software development environment that is written in Java, and that runs on both Linux and Windows, is intended to solve many of the problems of tool interoperability faced by developers of conventional tools."

"As analysts from the Hurwitz Group concluded, the move is consistent with IBM's commitment to Linux and growing tradition of incorporating open source code into its product lines: "With its experience with the open source application server Apache, and the Linux operating system, it makes sense that IBM would now move to provide the developer community with an open source development platform. The challenge for IBM and the Eclipse organization will be to draw strong and broad tool-vendor support to advance the platform, and to demonstrate that it is truly an open platform that enables straightforward tool integration to make it worthwhile for organizations to adopt. In addition, Eclipse needs to capture and enlist the efforts of the developer community at large, to test and refine the platform and add their innovation."

Eric S. Raymond The Magic Cauldron

"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."

redux [04.02.00]
News.Com Singing hosannas for Linux

" Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better. As you get further up the application stack, those two groups become disjointed...so the software that checks you into a hospital will never be open source because the people who care about that can't write software."