On Nov 24, 4:49 am, "andrew.bruce.law" <andrew.bruce....@gmail.com> wrote: > I think you're right, the major reason (or at least one of them) that > Sun gives away software (and this isn't related to it being OSS) is > that they realise there are free alternatives out there which are > "good enough". Their clients are generally "folks who see tech as a > differentiator, not a cost code" (to paraphrase Schwarz) so they're > savvy. Because of these free competing alternatives they need to > locate the value elsewhere - in the services and hardware platform. > > But this isn't the same as OSS. I could give away closed source > software. Sun are open sourcing *everything* - from the chip designs > to the old documentation. Listen to the podcast. It's enlightening. > I'd love to know what you think about it. (But watch out, Phipps is > really quite cocky - some things at Sun never change)
I listened to the podcast, and from what I heard, the money for Sun is in the "subscription cloud" on top of the OSS. Now this is different from their usual spin (sell more hardware eg.), but it is difficult to really make money this way. With the support subscription on top, I think you can offer three benefits: - stable, supported software version - support - useful closed-source software on top The first two aren't really safe - look at Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where you have a free, code-identical offering (CentOS) and somebody else offering support at half of Red Hat's price (Oracle). Apart from that, support doesn't seem to be a great way to make money for open- source companies, and it kinda sucks business-wise (revenue is a multiple of your bodies, so it's restricted profit-wise and doesn't scale easily up and down). I So that only leaves you with closed- source software, and that sounded like the example given in the podcast (doing a Solaris upgrade without much downtime through software vs. paying an admin to do that). Now Sun is doing this right now in the MySQL business where they have tuning software just for their enterprise customers, but they went back and forth on this a number of times. Then you're essentially back in tradition software business - people pay you for your closed stuff and get the OSS as an "extra". Karsten --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
