Playing Is Changing The Industry
This post isn’t about games but rather the business of open source.
Every open-source program companies download, investors say, marks one step closer to changing forever the applications business long dominated by the likes of SAP (SAP ), Oracle (ORCL ), and Microsoft (MSFT ). Software that companies once paid millions for is now available for free via the Internet. Harried tech managers can simply download an operating system or application and play with it …
… “We were looking at these open-source component companies like MySQL and JBoss, and every one of these things is just a little piece of a big puzzle,” says Lane. “We said, ‘Why don’t we play the whole puzzle?’”
Larry Ellison wants to play with a full stack, but he doesn’t want to pay a premium price for it:
I’m not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map. … So its all very interesting. You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just can’t charge a lot for it. There’s brand value – there’s real brand – there’s people, and that’s it.
Good food for thought for folks wondering about the economics of developing with the Croquet SDK. We’ll be much better off IMO with a thousand small businesses that are “highly profitable making $15 million year in and year out ” than than a few multi-billion companies dominating the ecosystem. We still have some large predators in our physical ecosystem, but they’re not dinosaurs.