Hello Madhukar, > From the day I came to know about Open Source I have a few questions. > This may be due to an incorrect understanding of the Open Source > philosophy. > > What is Open Source? Is it against selling the software itself, or > hiding the source code from the users?
I will not comment on this, because you will need to find out this yourself. One understands open source well by involving and participating in open source projects. > Is it possible to run a profitable software services/product business > by sharing the source code with the users? If there are any such > companies, how are they faring when compared to other proprietary > software companies? Many of big and successful companies like Google, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle, Redhat and many more companies own sizeable open source code base. Most reputed number of projects like Apache, Samba, Eclipse, VideoLan player, MySQL, Android, Java, Git etc are open source. As for your question - "Are companies using open source profitable" ?, you should also have a look at Zresearch - a fully open source company, which develops user space cluster file system, scalable to peta bytes named "Gluster". You also have Canonical which owns and runs Ubuntu. Then you have the venerable Shashi who runs Informedia, an increasingly growing company. I wrote a C++ wrapper over open souce VLC api at work recently. So there are REALLY companies making use of open source tools/code along with closed source, FYI or just them to churn out money. Thanks, -- Bharat | http://twitter.com/shettyb --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylug?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
