Marten Mickos: Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage To Succeed

Posted by Penguin on Jun 30, 2010 11:11 AM EDT
Computerworld UK; By Marten Mickos 		Mail this story
Print this story

A guest post from Mårten Mickos in response to Simon Phipps's statement of opposition to so-called "open core" models. Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition". He is the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL.

A characteristic and great feature of the world of free and open source software (FOSS) is that many of its participants love debating business models. Do closed source software vendors do that? I doubt.

Simon has some great points in his posting yesterday, reminding us all that the non-open features or services a company provides to its customers may lead to lock-in and reduction of freedoms for the customer. He also comments that open core businesses "stand to benefit massively" from this. It seems that he is arguing that this is a bad thing. My main point is the opposite: by having vendors in the open source space that benefit massively, we will have a stronger world of free and open source software (FOSS).

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Editorial, Interview

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.