LCA2009: Getting FOSS developers and companies to play nicely

Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 January 2009 09:47

Opinion and Analysis

Open source gave users flexibility in how they acquired support for the technology; users could even become developers or pay someone to do development and support work, he said. This was not possible with a proprietary product as code changes could be done by only a single company.

When it came to companies, revenue, growth, differentiation (how our product is better than the same or similar product sold by a rival) and corporate reputation were important factors.

Expenses kept increasing and revenue had to keep pace; this, in turn, created opportunities for employees to move within the corporate structure.

Garbee pointed out that technology companies were not interested in competing only in delivery of commodities as the margins were very low and would not fund innovation. Companies wanted to add value that customers would pay for, with a traditional goal being control points like patents.

He said it was better to think less about control points and more about affinities between the developers and corporates and there were some such factors.

The ultimate goal for either a company or a FOSS developer was a positive user experience, he said, adding that developers, no matter what they said, wanted others to be able to use and benefit from the software they developed.

Making software useful to users was also something companies aimed for as this meant the user would be willing to pay for the product, Garbee said.

He advised developers not to be upset if a company took their work and then went about building proprietary add-ons. Of course, developers were always welcome to try and create an open source alternative to the proprietary add-on.

His advice carries weight - HP's sales of Linux servers far outstrip that of its competitors. He must be doing something right.