FLOSS – and the rest
p2p news view / p2pnet: I was reading an interview ITBusiness.ca had with Novell CEO Jack Messman. It spoke about their ongoing migration to the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software) marketplace and made me think about the transformative changes happening in the larger software marketplace.
One of the statistics people like to hear about with FLOSS is the size of the marketplace, seeking to compare it with the incumbent "software manufacturing" marketplace (sometimes called "proprietary software").
This is worse than comparing apples-to-oranges. At least, the latter are both fruit.
The problem is: while it’s easy for our "software manufacturing" competitors to count boxes and claim the retail channel is also part of their value-added (ie, "piracy statistics" that claim declines in the legacy distribution channels are also a cost of alleged "infringement"), they’re counting vendor and distributors’ "money making," ignoring the larger marketplace which includes the users of that software.
With FLOSS, you’re talking not about a top-down, but a bottom-up marketplace where each piece of the puzzle is "saving money".It does that by collaborating on the creation of infrastructure software – software that’s useful to more than just a single customer.
Whether you’re a customer participating in the collaboration (a piece of the puzzle not factored in at all by the "software manufacturing" statistics), or vendors such as IBM and Novell, the real value of FLOSS is the reduction in overhead costs, which show up as increased profits for the organizations’ actual value-add products and services.
It isn’t possible to compare the "money made" (which represents a cost to everyone else) with the "money saved" using a different methodology.
So what statistic should we be showing people?
What is it that people really want to know?
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
March 24th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
I think there’s an intellectual divide that may never change. You’ve got many heads of companies who are dumbasses, and only look at a retail box being sold as value. They’re the ones that will simply have to loose out, but oh well.
Then you got smart folk. If they need a database for their backend, they can spend 10 million dollars to develop it or they can install mySQL for free and add their needed features for 10 thousand dollars instead. Survival of the most intelligent is the name of the game in business, and the smart folks will end up on top. We don’t need the idiots to join the evolution of nondifferentiating software, because they’re just going to die out anyway.
March 25th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
The concern isn’t what would happen in a free market, as I agree that progress will win out. The idea of sharing knowledge that underlines Free/Libre and Open Source Software is the same scientific method that ended the dark ages and brought us the enlightenment.
What I worry about is unaware politicians listening to the lobbiests from the old-economy industries and having government interventions in the marketplace. We already have a large number of government policies which radically favour legacy “software manufacturing” over FLOSS, including existing government procurement policy (I have an outstanding ATIP complaint about a Public Works attempt to mandate Microsoft on all Canadian government computers), software patents, and DRM which considers the owner of a device to be its attacker.