Even people inside the open source market tend to underestimate it.
They think of it the way they think of the software market. If you're not collecting cash tribute for support (the equivalent of a cash price for the code) you somehow don't count.
By that reckoning open source has been a disappointment. Many companies have difficulty converting downloads into cash. Products on the "bottom of the stack" -- operating systems, databases, languages etc. -- have special problems in the era of "the cloud," with data centers consolidating.
But that's, frankly, a pretty stupid way of looking at it.
- What are Facebook and all the other social media sites but scaled, customer-facing open source applications? They're all written with it.
- Clouds are highly dependent on open source for their very being. Virtualization began with companies wanting to run Windows instances under server Linux. Most of the important cloud creation tools are open source.
- Android is a Linux. It's open source, even if the newest versions may be released first only to partners. Android is beating the iPhone the way Windows beat the Mac.
We got another example in today's news, the launch by Texas Instruments of a site called OpenLink, an open source community for wireless hardware development.
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