Monday, September 22, 2008

Cloud Computing, open source, and business models

From a comment on the Slashdot discussion of Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source:

resistence is futile
unless your product is targeted at such a small subset of users that noone in the OSS world would bother to create a competing product there will always be some geek out there willing to dedicate all their spare time to create something that will compete with your product... for free. What proprietry vendors need to do is charging for software as a service and provide support packages that the OSS world don't bother to do.


In a world of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing, where the developer charges for the initial work and usage, the role of intellectual property in guaranteeing a return on investment will diminish.

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