Forbes: Open Source companies are turning on each other
Open Source Smack-Down Daniel Lyons, 06.15.05, 2:30 PM ET
You should put a question mark at the end of an interogative sentence, malloc, it helps the...
NEW YORK - Marc Fleury is shocked--shocked!--that IBM would use the same tactics to attack him that he's been using to attack IBM.
on June 18 06:59 pm billwg Do tell us why you spend a lot of your your time in a Linux group singing the...
"Frankly, it leaves us scratching our heads," he says.
For the past two years Fleury's company, Atlanta, Ga.-based JBoss, has been stealing business from IBM by giving away a set of open source programs that do the same work as IBM's WebSphere software. Fleury claims JBoss shipped more copies last year than IBM did.
IBM apparently has grown tired of having a freebie program eating away at its sales. So now it is going nuclear. In May the computer giant acquired JBoss's main rival, Gluecode, which also distributes a set of open source Web server programs.
Gluecode used to make money by selling some "closed source" programs that ran on top of its free open source stuff. No more, says IBM, which intends to release the source code for all of Gluecode's programs and distribute them for free. IBM also will slash prices on service and support, charging less than half of what Gluecode used to charge, says Scott Cosby, IBM's Gluecode transition executive.
"Where does this all end? When the whole deck of cards, the whole software industry, falls apart? I find it arrogant on their part that they think they can control what they've unleashed," says Fleury, JBoss' chairman and chief executive.
Problem is, most people just take the free stuff and run. Only 3% to 5% of JBoss customers buy support contracts.
Even proponents like Fleury admit the open source business model is not intended to produce powerful, wealthy, mbuttively profitable software companies.
Yet people are racing into this business, and venture capitalists keep funding them, pumping $150 million into open source startups in 2004, triple the amount for 2003, according to VentureOne.
Microsoft Open XML formats not really ŇOpen". "The fact that Microsoft is trying to lock out GPL developers is hardly surprising as they are doing something very...
Sounds like the dot-com bubble, except that this time it's not just investors who will get burned. Customers are taking a risk too. Because when these open source software providers burn through their venture funding and go out of business, customers will need to either hire teams of expensive techies to maintain that orphaned code or pay someone to rip out the old stuff and replace it with something new. Either way, all that free software is suddenly going to look awfully expensive.
The good news, if you're a JBoss customer, is that IBM will be there to help you migrate.
Linux Advocacy from Newsgroups