Opensource Business

Ben Galbraith made the following great point in his recent blog
entry
in praise of intelligent tools such as IDEA.

Maybe it's because I hope to sell software someday,
maybe because I know how hard it is to write good software,
but for whatever reason, I actually like supporting great ISVs by buying their product.
I spend thousands of dollars on ISV products each year because I feel its the right
thing to do.

IDEA vs competition from opensource options, is an interesting case study
of the software market in general. One wants to support vendors producing great stuff,
like JetBrains, Atlassian, and the like. But one also wants to
support opensource/community projects,
which likely present an important part of the future.

Even bastions like Microsoft and Oracle are at a loss, and what does that bode
for our industry? Interestingly, Apple seems to have surpassed Microsoft in the OS game
by coopting a solid opensource platform, and focussing their efforts on the GUI layer.
IBM embraces opensource projects to provide products and services around those.
Sun has opensourced its assets to drive hardware sales and professional support services.
Well, it was either that or let Red Hat help themselves to their OS and middleware markets.

If it wasn't for Eclipse and Netbeans, maybe Sun or IBM would have bought JetBrains
and opensourced IDEA? Maybe in future JetBrains will opensource IDEA themselves,
to drive volume for more niche products?

This prospect of a world where all prominent software is free and opensource,
is disconcerting because traditionally a small startup business
developed some software in order to sell it. But these days the trend is
to build free-use websites and opensource software to drive other revenues
eg. professional services.

So maybe the future is that most startups will
build on opensource software to add particular value eg. MyEclipse,
or create opensource software to drive volume eg. Terracotta,
and generally provide complementary products and services
around opensource software.

But hopefully there'll always be opportunity for small businesses
to create great new software from scratch, and sell it, pure and simple?
Later, you might find opensource equivalents snapping at your heels.
But if you're competing against "free" then at least your product
really has to be good, and you gotta keep making it even better, or die trying.