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Story: Bursting the proprietary-software bubble

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Posted by: 1000047814 (Friday 7 November 2008, 1:39 PM)

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True, for software which is commoditized

Your underlying economic theory starts with the assumption that the good in question is a commodity. Some software is - for example, utilities to zip and unzip and other small, commonly used and easy to reproduce packages. Some much larger things have become near commodities, like Linux, because the demand huge so there's enough motivation for an open source market to develop. Open Office may yet get there.

But you overgeneralize. Certainly there are open source initiatives for virtually any type of software, but many (perhaps most) of them are not effective because there isn't enough critical mass of interest to produce software that matches the capabilities of proprietary software. So at very least the dinosaurs can continue to make money on the "long tail" of highly complex or lesser used software areas.

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