Open source developers
Linux saavy people or more generally people who are into open source software are usually described as being super geeky people with leftist leaning. Like almost communist in their “political views”.
That is total bullshit!
Apart from the psychological benefits you get by helping others and sharing, knowing how to use open source programs puts you in a very sweet spot where can use the program and turn it into a useful service people will pay for…
Sysadmins with email/NFS/LDAP service contracts, web developers with their LAMP stack hosting or django site and pretty much any entrepreneur with an idea that has something to do with computers…
So the difference between “open source” vs “selling binaries” is not political at all. It is more the type of business they run: service or product oriented. Both approaches are empowered by technologically. You can make many copies of your binaries and sell them to become very rich OR you can scale your web service to many thousand servers and handle lots of users.
As you can see the “production costs” in the SAS approach scale linearly with n, while selling binaries is practically free after the initial development effort (except for support and bugfixes, etc.). You would think then that the service people are stupid since they are missing out on the “free lunch” they could be having selling CDs in boxes at Futureshop….
Perhaps you would be right. Perhaps we should all be programming iPhone apps, Vista “widgets” and other such mainstream stuff. That would be a pretty sad world for the programmers… no joy, just clock in at 9AM write some code, coffee brake, lunch brake, go home check the pay check in the mail YEAH success!
Open source allows for something much more exciting. You could create your own empire. A company that rivals technologically with any established corporation and you can do that in a team of 4 people dedicated to one solid project. Not 4000 people but 4. Maybe even 2 if you’ve got skills…
And above all — it will be your empire in the end — you won’t be just a faceless employee number #5937571.
Choose your path.
You’re forgetting the companies that use open source as a means to an end. For example, my ISP might not have existed if open source software wasn’t there. Linux levels the playing field significantly in some areas.
Comment by Vlad — March 8, 2009 @ 3:01 pm