Software2005: Open and Loosely Joined
In the near future, what trends can we anticipate within the software
sector? It seems that you can’t read the table of contents in a
technology-related trade magazine these days and not find an article
about the growing open-source software phenomenon. So why is there a
for-profit interest in a topic that’s most often associated with the
word FREE?
Applying logic might suggest to us that there's zero-profit likely to be
made in free software. On the surface, the open-source movement appears
to defy basic economic principles. But, perhaps that flawed notion is
where much of the confusion about this evolving commercial ecosystem
<http://osbc.mwi.com/> might originate. As an example, using the source
code might not require a purchase, but the creation and ongoing
development certainly wasn't free of costs that someone, somewhere,
absorbed either directly or indirectly in the process.
Also, contrary to popular belief, those costs can be significant and in
some cases relatively easy to quantify. A case in point, IBM knows that
the company invested $40 million in the development of Eclipse before it
turned the software project over -- as open-source -- to the Eclipse
Foundation <http://www.eclipse.org/>. You think that's a big number?
This year IBM agreed to take it's lightweight database technology called
Cloudscape, which has been renamed to Derby, and contribute it as
open-source to the Apache Software Foundation
<http://incubator.apache.org/derby/>. IBM's, and other previous owners,
estimated total investment in Cloudscape development, about $85 million.
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