"Tim Smith" <reply_in_group@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:reply_in_group-23E952.17055709032008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and
peripheral participation in mature, community-led
Free/Open source software projects"
<http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/PhD_Berdou.pdf>
Here's an article about that thesis, which will give the gist of some of
it.
<http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9885248-16.html?%5E$>
This effort ties into the "market analysis" that you flogged Shestowitz
about in another thread. I think that it misses the point in the same way
that Roy's did, although it takes ever so much more time in doing so.
Where paid developers are working on open source projects, they are almost
universally doing so to benefit the commercial activities of a company that
is in some way selling open source products. The far and away leader of
that pack is Red Hat which is essentially a service provider for companies
that want server configuration and management services and who think that
Linux meets their needs. Red Hat has to keep Linux up to snuff, just as
proprietary Unix companies need to keep their own versions of Unix up to
snuff and Microsoft needs to keep Windows up to snuff. It matters not to
Red Hat if some user who does not need nor want their services uses Fedora
or even poaches on the RHEL reservation. The freeloaders are not customers
and are never going to be customers until they change their ways and Red Hat
has the apparent internal sales discipline to more or less ignore what these
users do. That is similar to the way that Microsoft seems to so ineptly
defend their products against pirates. The BSA seems to catch enough of
their commercial poachers to maintain a tidy income stream and that is
enough.
So paid contributors to open source are paid by companies that have another
axe to grind that generates income, if only in a minor way compared to the
really successful commercial and proprietary companies. So what?
Shestowitz seems to suggest that the Linux users are stealthy and so avoid
ever appearing on the usage radar in the numbers that wants them to be found
to exist. That somehow soothes his need to see open source triumph over the
Microsoft beast. That is, of course, lame and rather childishy simplistic,
but it is also totally beside any useful point.
Commercial markets are measured in terms of dollar revenues associated with
them and share is an indicator of how much money a company is getting from
the market as defined. If there is some "stealthy" or overt "competitor"
that is in play, that is something that a company selling their products
would care to know about, certainly, but it is not something that really
affects their marketing decisions historically. The server (and desktop) OS
market size and share for Windows has been increasing fairly well and fairly
consistently for Microsoft over the past ten years, ever since they truly
had product to offer in this regard. Market size and share increases seem
to be robust at this time and that suggests that the impact of Linux in any
"stealth" mode has been inconsequential. Shares and unit volumes that
accrue to Novell and Red Hat are measurable using normal metrics and methods
and they show enough for Microsoft to plan their product's futures.
|
|
