Enterprise open source Toolkit

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Story: Shadow chancellor slams government over open source

Posted by: Andrew Meredith (Thursday 8 March 2007, 5:50 PM)

Apples and Oranges

The UK textile, manufacturing & ship building businesses fell because they could no longer treat their employees as cheap, disposable slaves. The factories just moved to other places where they could. Simplified perhaps, but not too far out.

If you are holding out for the survival of the parts of the IT industry who make tankerloads of profit from recycling the same old code, locking their customers into an endless cycle of upgrades, giving bad service and generally messing their customers about then I'm afraid you are quite right in that they are doomed. However, this isn't down to Open Source. This is just down to basic capitalist priciples in operation.

Examine a closed source business. The money they make is generally not from the actual business of writing, testing and releasing software. It is more often from consultancy, support and training. The same things that Open Source companies make their money from. The big difference is that they cannot lock their customers in and so cannot strong arm their customers into paying more than the service they provide is worth.

As for Open Source being anti-competitive, this one is straight out of the Microsoft playbook and is the exact oposite of the truth. You can only buy Microsoft Word or Microsoft XP from one manufacturer. If anyone else gets too close they get sued into a hole in the ground. Now THAT is anti-competitive and what's more the US and EU justice systems seem to agree.

A few years ago, a Red Hat Linux release was being widely panned by their customers, who seemed to feel that RH were being less than helpful. A group of French software developers got together, lifted the entire RH Linux source tree, fixed it and released it as a new product. It was very successful and entirely legal. This product was called Mandrake and launched a new company. Now THAT's pure competition.

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