6/13    Does the open source business model work?
        \_ open source is NOT a business model dammit!  There are a variety
           of business models that can incorporate open source, and some of
           them work and some of them don't.
        \_ have you seen an "open source" company that had reported healthy
           and steady profits so far?
        \_ if "open source" == "linux" then at least one company managed
           to get the model to work (hint they were acquired by sun)
           \_ it almost seems like the way to make open source work is to
              be bought out by another company.  Another company I know
              was bought out by Cisco.
              \_ What company hasn't been bought out by Cisco?
                 \_ Cisco's acquisition rate was about 1 company every
                    two months from 1998-2000. Cisco passed on most
                    companies and mostly only purchased winners, linux
                    was not a winner in cisco's eyes. - cisco alum
                    \_ You talk about Cisco as if it was a good thing.
                       \_ Cisco is a great company with good engineering
                          and great management and sales. The corporate
                          culture was excellent as was the compensation
                          package. I would say that Cisco was probably
                          one of the best companies to work for and I
                          wouldn't mind returning in the future (once
                          my options vest at my current company).
           \_ Cobalt is a hardware company. Yes, Linux hardware companies
              will manage to make some money. What about the software
              companies? Promisses, promisses ..
              \_ Not all linux hardware companies make that much money.
                 Most of cobalt's competition (also linux based) went
                 under or are struggling (va & neteng). In any case
                 sans sun, cobalt would probably be in the same boat
                 as va or neteng, perhaps even worse.
        \_ Cygnus was around a reasonably long time weren't they? Oh wait,
           nevermind...
        \_ It works for hardware companies (Sun, SGI, IBM, Cobalt, etc.)
           with decent products - saves them on software development costs.
                \_ Sun and SGI have decent products?
                   \_ Sun has decent products. The entire netra line
                      and the enterpise line (450 and upto E10K) are
                      very good and much cheaper (inital investment
                      and lifetime cost), much more so than the equivalent
                      from HP, IBM and Compaq. SGI used to be good,
                      but all they've got now is BlueMountain.
                      \_ SGI still makes decent products. They've been
                         a disaster, financially because they didn't
                         have a catchy slogan like "We're the Dot in
                         dot com" crap. That, and they flirted with NT
                         and Cray for a while
                         \_ NT was a disaster, but now they are peddling
                            Linux which is agruably worse for a niche
                            vendor like SGI. SGI also has problems in the
                            high end, since most of the clustering and
                            massively parallel technology came with the
                            cray acquisition which was subsequently sold
                            to sun. SGI was floundering as early as 96
                            and thier failure had little to do with
                            Sun's marketing and much more to do with a
                            unreliable os (irix has thousands of patches
                            and is a headache to maintain and develop
                            software for), properitary expensive hardware
                            and a weak/non-existant enterprise story.
                            Unlike apple, whose price points are low
                            enough for customers making up for a weak
                            enterprise story, SGI's prices were way too
                            high for most individuals and even most
                            companies, forcing them into the niche
                            of ultra high end graphics and scientific
                            computing, both of which are not long term
                            growth industries from a revenue standpoint.
                            \_ No shit. SGI isn't in the consumer market.
                               Of course it's too expensive for most
                               individuals, the same way a 747 is too
                               expensive for most individuals for Boeing
                               to sell to.
                               \_ You missed the point. Boeing is a
                                  market leader in an industry of 1.
                                  SGI is a market trailer in an industry
                                  of several giants and they don't have
                                  price or technology advantages in
                                  order to grow.
                            \_ SGI's main problem is being king of a market
                               that shouldn't exist: large-scale numa SHM.
           \_ sun has not "opensourced" their software in any way that
              is saving them money.
              It would save them more money if they kept all the
              internals secret, but actually released APIs for the
              currently black-box areas.