Welcome!

Java IoT Authors: Elizabeth White, Liz McMillan, Yeshim Deniz, Zakia Bouachraoui, Pat Romanski

Related Topics: Machine Learning , Open Source Cloud

Machine Learning : Article

Viewpoint: Time for Open Source Software Vendors to Think Beyond Free

Thinking that free is the only aspect of software that matters is "freetarded" - Microsoft is onto us
By Christopher Keene
Article Rating:
June 13, 2008 03:45 AM EDT
Reads:
 23,780
Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness. Savio Rodrigues had a good posting recently making the point that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective.

Let's be clear - the free part of open source is a great innovation and worthy of a few minutes of self-satisfaction. The aftermath of the Y2K bubble was the erection of enormous barriers around IT to prevent tem from trying anything new that would cost the company money.

Free provides a "frictionless" entry point for new technology products into the corporation after finance barred the door. Free also enables technology self-service across the corporation, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a geek gene to get as wired as they wanna be.

However, free is only worth so much. If it takes me 3 hours to get my "free" open source download working, it cost me however much I or my boss thinks my time is worth x 3 = not free. Similarly, even if an open source product (for example Dojo) is technically superior in every way to Silverlight, that superiority is of no practical value if it is easy to hire experienced Silverlight developers but next to impossible to find, let alone hire, Dojo developers.

Thinking that free is the only aspect of software that matters is freetarded. This is where Microsoft can beat the open source community in general, just as its .NET platform is beating J2EE.

Let me quote from the insanely great Fake Steve Jobs blog:

Red Hat, the single company freetards always point to when they want to prove that open source can make money, has turned inept, with nothing but bluster and bravado and a deluded belief that they're actually a thorn in Microsoft's paw. Bottom line: they're the new Borland. They're 15 years old and have been publicly traded since 1999 and last year they did all of $400 million a year in sales. Microsoft does more than $1 billion a week. That's right. Red Hat's entire fiscal year is a good three days for Microsoft.
Microsoft is onto us. Time for open source software vendors to think beyond free.

Published June 13, 2008 – Reads 23,780
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Christopher Keene

Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). He was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.

After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.

Comments (5) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

Most Recent Comments
Mark Murphy 04/21/08 04:45:57 PM EDT

"Savio Rodrigues had a good posting..."

If that was a "good posting", this comment might be worthy of a Pulitzer. Any article, blog posting, or whatever using the term "freetards" doesn't exactly give you much credibility. Morover, Mr. Rodrigues failed to provide any proof for his assertion that "the OSS movement has been prematurely readying Microsoft’s eulogy", among other curious unqualified statements.

"the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective"

The "open-source movement" doesn't have customers, any more than a libertarian has customers, or a Catholic has customers. Open source is a development model (see http://www.opensource.org/), Free Software is a philosophy (http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software), and neither are a company.

If you want to cite how individual firms offering open source solutions are or are not paying attention to TCO, that's a fine comparison to make. But comparing the "open-source movement" to Microsoft makes no sense.

"If it takes me 3 hours to get my "free" open source download working, it cost me however much I or my boss thinks my time is worth x 3 = not free."

And if it takes you 8 hours to get the equivalent not-free product working, it cost you the price of the product plus 8 hours labor.

In other words, all products have TCO to consider, not just "free" ones. Once again, you need to compare like constructs -- pointing out that "free" software has non-zero TCO and ignoring the fact that non-free software also has non-zero TCO is poor journalism.

"that superiority is of no practical value if it is easy to hire experienced Silverlight developers but next to impossible to find, let alone hire, Dojo developers"

Again, though, this is not a free vs. non-free issue. Most commercial COBOL installations are not free, yet there may be more Dojo developers than COBOL developers available for hire. Any given technology may have more developers than some other technology. You have not demonstrated how this can be construed as being a free/not-free issue.

"Thinking that free is the only aspect of software that matters is freetarded."

There's that word again. Free Software is a philosophy; calling Free Software advocates "freetards" is a slur no different than the slurs for Jews used by people who don't agree with their philosophy. Please explain why your use of slurs makes your article a better piece of journalism.

"Time for open source software vendors to think beyond free."

You might consider, possibly, listing some vendors you believe are not thinking "beyond free", rather than simply setting up a straw man to back your slurs.
derk 04/19/08 09:53:37 PM EDT

You guys left out one major open source successful product - Apache web server, which is owning 55% to 75% of the market.
bumpy 04/19/08 10:31:25 AM EDT

Time for you to think beyond "free as in beer". Think about "free as in freedom". Software whose source code is secret is worthless to me.
lefty.crupps 03/16/08 03:00:10 PM EDT

Free Software has a more important version of Free than its cost -- it's the freedoms to use, modify, and distribute the software under the GPL. *That* is the importance of Free software (and the emphasis), not its cost.
A. Banerji 03/16/08 03:47:33 AM EDT

Is absolute figure (Redhat v Microsoft) the only determinant of success? A redhat may die tomorrow, M$ can also follow it's worthy predecessors of the 60s - ICL died ... were they dealing in freeware?

It's all about adaptive business model. If Google is still doing well today (with mostly freebies for the average user), it's got nothing to do with the meaningless free v patent controversy ... Google has got it right so far - tomorrow's another day.
IoT & Smart Cities Stories
By Elizabeth White
IoT is rapidly becoming mainstream as more and more investments are made into the platforms and technology. As this movement continues to expand and gain momentum it creates a massive wall of noise that can be difficult to sift through. Unfortunately, this inevitably makes IoT less approachable for people to get started with and can hamper efforts to integrate this key technology into your own portfolio. There are so many connected products already in place today with many hundreds more on the h...
Jun. 23, 2018 07:30 AM EDT  Reads: 2,057
By Elizabeth White
SYS-CON Events announced today that IoT Global Network has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 6–8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The IoT Global Network is a platform where you can connect with industry experts and network across the IoT community to build the successful IoT business of the future.
Jun. 23, 2018 07:15 AM EDT  Reads: 4,934
By Liz McMillan
CloudEXPO New York 2018, colocated with DXWorldEXPO New York 2018 will be held November 11-13, 2018, in New York City and will bring together Cloud Computing, FinTech and Blockchain, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, AI, Machine Learning and WebRTC to one location.
Jun. 23, 2018 07:15 AM EDT  Reads: 3,779
By Yeshim Deniz
Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereal. Andrew's role at ConsenSys Enterprise is a mul...
Jun. 23, 2018 07:00 AM EDT  Reads: 4,024
By Yeshim Deniz
DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO are the world's most influential, independent events where Cloud Computing was coined and where technology buyers and vendors meet to experience and discuss the big picture of Digital Transformation and all of the strategies, tactics, and tools they need to realize their goals. Sponsors of DXWorldEXPO | CloudEXPO benefit from unmatched branding, profile building and lead generation opportunities.
Jun. 23, 2018 06:45 AM EDT  Reads: 5,264
By Liz McMillan
Disruption, Innovation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Leadership and Management hear these words all day every day... lofty goals but how do we make it real? Add to that, that simply put, people don't like change. But what if we could implement and utilize these enterprise tools in a fast and "Non-Disruptive" way, enabling us to glean insights about our business, identify and reduce exposure, risk and liability, and secure business continuity?
Jun. 23, 2018 06:30 AM EDT  Reads: 1,527
By Yeshim Deniz
The best way to leverage your Cloud Expo presence as a sponsor and exhibitor is to plan your news announcements around our events. The press covering Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo will have access to these releases and will amplify your news announcements. More than two dozen Cloud companies either set deals at our shows or have announced their mergers and acquisitions at Cloud Expo. Product announcements during our show provide your company with the most reach through our targeted audiences.
Jun. 23, 2018 06:00 AM EDT  Reads: 3,684
By Zakia Bouachraoui
DXWorldEXPO LLC announced today that Telecom Reseller has been named "Media Sponsor" of CloudEXPO | DXWorldEXPO 2018 New York, which will take place on November 11-13, 2018 in New York City, NY. Telecom Reseller reports on Unified Communications, UCaaS, BPaaS for enterprise and SMBs. They report extensively on both customer premises based solutions such as IP-PBX as well as cloud based and hosted platforms.
Jun. 23, 2018 05:30 AM EDT  Reads: 4,963
By Yeshim Deniz
To Really Work for Enterprises, MultiCloud Adoption Requires Far Better and Inclusive Cloud Monitoring and Cost Management … But How? Overwhelmingly, even as enterprises have adopted cloud computing and are expanding to multi-cloud computing, IT leaders remain concerned about how to monitor, manage and control costs across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. It’s clear that traditional IT monitoring and management approaches, designed after all for on-premises data centers, are falling short in ...
Jun. 23, 2018 02:30 AM EDT  Reads: 3,210
By Zakia Bouachraoui
The deluge of IoT sensor data collected from connected devices and the powerful AI required to make that data actionable are giving rise to a hybrid ecosystem in which cloud, on-prem and edge processes become interweaved. Attendees will learn how emerging composable infrastructure solutions deliver the adaptive architecture needed to manage this new data reality. Machine learning algorithms can better anticipate data storms and automate resources to support surges, including fully scalable GPU-c...
Jun. 23, 2018 01:45 AM EDT
MORE »