netzooid

Lately companies like IBM, BEA, and Simula Labs have been swooping in on open source projects like Spring, Geronimo, and ActiveMQ. Are they letting the open source community absorb the risk in creating software?

For instance, projects are created. They stew and incubate. The buzz spreads. Developers fawn. Hani biles. During this process the “open source community” (*cough* I hate that term) provides a feed back loop during development so it happens quickly and efficiently. Once projects mature, larger companies swoop in, pick up the developers, provide support, integrate them with their products etc. Or at least this is what I’m seeing happen.

I still question the business plans of such companies. Service and support is not in my mind a sure fire combo – and definitely not a way to come up with billions in the bank. I lost the link, but there was an article about how as more and more people become comfortable with open source, the less likely they are going to want to support. They’ll start asking, if they really need a lifeline? And, does it really pay? In addition there is the up-sell strategy and a hundred other angles…

But will they result in successful businesses with a decent ROI? Maybe… There certainly seem to be some winners lately. I think it depends on how much value you can actually add on top of the open source offering. But that is a whole new blog entry…

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Javercising.