Open Source Insanity?

Matt Assay posted a blog entry today that hit on some points that have been on my mind for quite a while.

Matt draws a parallel between the pre-dot-com-bust obsession over "eyeballs" as a metric of valuation and today -- where some organizations are obsessing over downloads not giving any thought to how to build a sound business model on top of it.

It's almost as if some have been duped into believing that software has a negative marginal cost - just get your brand on as many desktops as humanly possible and you will figure it out how to monetize it later. Pre dot-com was "just get lots of people to visit our site, and we'll figure out how to monetize it later".

Whoops.

I don't think it's a coincedence that all of Matt's examples of successful organizations are all Eclipse Foundation members. RedHat, MySQL, SugarCRM and JBOSS are doing very well by realizing you need to have a sound business model and go beyond a "we'll figure it out later" approach. Moreover, these are organizations that realize the importance of not reinventing the wheel - compete on a common platform and share effort wherever possible.

- Don