Matt Asay interviewed Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation a few days ago for his ZDNet blog series. Lots of interesting insights from the chief Linux cat herder, but perhaps the most striking quote for me was this one:
“We have to get over this idea that open-source software will produce companies that look just like their proprietary counterparts. I owe much of my career to venture capitalists, but if they are expecting the same returns from the proprietary software portfolio’s that they had in the 1990s they are crazy.”
Exactly true I think. Chris Anderson’s “Free – The Future of a Radical Price“, posits that you can make plenty of dough pricing your digital assets at zero. Much of the pointed criticism of his book point out the brutal truth: there aren’t many examples of this working, outside of a few well-known famous examples that are very hard to copy.
The software industry is fast consolidating, commoditizing, and morphing into a mature industry with low margins and competition based on partnerships, product line extensions, and marketing, rather than technology and innovation. Software is no different than any other industry in that regard. It is an inexorable fact of life, driven by the structure of the world economy and the nature of technology diffusion. But FOSS accelerates and institutionalizes this rapid maturation. Free, the price, is a direct consequence of Free, the licensing paradigm. This fact should change our expectations, shouldn’t it? Has it changed yours? Or do you think there is plenty of room left to monetize innovation and technology in the wide world of software?