Investing in open source

“There is NO business model for open source. There is only one business model: sell for more than it cost you”

The words belong to Bill Roth, currently a vice president at BEA, who used to run OpenOffice back when he worked at SUN. A veteran open source developer, and a member of the original GCC team.

According to Roth, the open source community can’t sustain itself without heavy investment. Though the payoff will be big if companies invest in communities like the Apache Foundation, for example.

According to Roth, much of the resistance to open source in companies comes from the fear of trusting business operations to “a bunch of Finnish students”.

I think the situation in Chile is worse, since our IT managers are pretty ignorant and prefer to go with “the devil you know”.

Of course, not everything can be solved with open source, but decision makers do need to be educated about the advantages and disadvantages of free software solutions, and that’s where things get complicated. Sadly, the only arguments you ever hear are that there are no licenses to pay for, or that it isn’t Microsoft. Those are no guarantee for any company. The open source community has to do better at showing that its products are useful to business.

As Roth says, a lot of the time it’s preferable to sign a contract with an “executive in an expensive suit”, someone you can sue….