Cortlandt writes:
> Recently a officer from Lutris (Enhydra) send a message to the
> Enhydra list expressing their doubts about the open source model
> for many types of products.

I find it endlessly amusing that some people on the one hand think that Open
Source is going to put companies like Microsoft out of business, and yet
they try to create Microsoft-like companies that attempt to sell free
products and subsequently find themselves put out of business by their own
free software.

I now firmly believe that free software is likely to eliminate Microsoft as
the major software player over the next few years.

The Internet has turned the world into one big market for many kinds of
products and thus eliminated any geographic advantages that a company might
have.  You can no longer charge more just because you're the only store in
town because there only is one "town" now and everyone is in it, including
all your possible competitors.

And in this same way it has also brought all of the people who share common
problems together in the same place, and for every problem that has a
software solution which is general enough to apply to all the people with
the problem, a "free" solution is eventually going to develop.

As a result, I believe that any model of business which relies on selling
the same canned software product to a very large group of people is doomed.

The most general software tools will be the first to go because they have
the largest base of users and potential free software contributors.  So
first it's the operating system and development tools, then it's the
database, then it's the "office" application suite, etc.

There will always be money to be made building and implementing custom
solutions to individual problems, but this is quite different from writing a
program once and selling it millions of times without doing any more work.

The only hope for the traditional software company model is in complex
solutions to vertical markets that are small enough to preclude the
critical-mass of free software development arising, and in the creation of
unique "works of art" like computer games.

All of the above applies to "selling" software.  Other models of profiting
from software such as the give-the-software-away-and-charge-for-the-support
model *may* be practical, but the jury is still out on this I think.

G.

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