Comment Re:'Innovation' (Score 1) 152
That's because OpenSource is really about commodity software.
Linux is the commodity Unix kernel; Mozilla is the commodity HTML renderer. Each of these has reached a commodity stage where there is no innovation anymore.
My professional product constantly get chased by the OpenSource competitors. This keeps me on my toes and keeps me innovating. My customers buy my product because of this innovation.
It's really a win-win situation: I get paid because I provide new and innovative stuff, my customers gets innovations nobody would have bothered with without getting paid, and whenever the features reach a commodity stage I happily contribute them back to the OpenSouce community. This OpenSource body of code is then used by all vendors as a way of sharing a stable bugfixed commodity codebase. People who don't want bleeding edge can have an all-free 'gratis' version. The OSS version is stable, gray and a little boring and if it breaks they get to keep both pieces.
My primary desktop OS, Mac OS X, is a prime example. It's an OpenSource (commodity) kernel with lots of excellent innovative apps and libraries built on-top. I happily pay Apple for that. Some people think Ubuntu is good enough - their choice.
Linux is the commodity Unix kernel; Mozilla is the commodity HTML renderer. Each of these has reached a commodity stage where there is no innovation anymore.
My professional product constantly get chased by the OpenSource competitors. This keeps me on my toes and keeps me innovating. My customers buy my product because of this innovation.
It's really a win-win situation: I get paid because I provide new and innovative stuff, my customers gets innovations nobody would have bothered with without getting paid, and whenever the features reach a commodity stage I happily contribute them back to the OpenSouce community. This OpenSource body of code is then used by all vendors as a way of sharing a stable bugfixed commodity codebase. People who don't want bleeding edge can have an all-free 'gratis' version. The OSS version is stable, gray and a little boring and if it breaks they get to keep both pieces.
My primary desktop OS, Mac OS X, is a prime example. It's an OpenSource (commodity) kernel with lots of excellent innovative apps and libraries built on-top. I happily pay Apple for that. Some people think Ubuntu is good enough - their choice.
