Thursday, September 07, 2006

"Freeware"

Yeah, Open Source Software is just Freeware. Weird commies in their underwear slanging out code for free because ... well who knows. And some academics too. That is all.

Nothing to see here. Just move along please ... MOVE ALONG.

I saw this a month ago, but someone on my team (biggest scariest smartest Viking you ever saw) forward it around again yesterday.

If anyone pours FUD on your Open Source parade, bang them on the head with this.

Um k, a couple excerpts for those afraid of clicking:

Open source is so pervasive that IDC declares in this study that open-source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC analysts also believe that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.

Wait, it isn't just build vs. buy? Yep-um-no.

As business requirements shift from acquiring new customers to sustaining existing ones, the competitive landscape will move towards costs savings and serving up sustaining innovations to savvy customers, along with providing mainstream software to new market segments that are willing to pay only a fraction of conventional software license fees," Picardi added. "Open source software is ultimately a resource for sustaining innovators.

2 comments:

Alok said...

There was an interesting article published last year on using a type of options pricing model (Black-Scholes) to price enterprise software. The gist of it was that if you discount, from the purchase price of software, the cost of the options of buying maintainance and upgrades, the actual cost of the software is close to zero. In other words, the author argues that an enterprice buyer will pay substantially less for software that they cannot buy maintainence on and not be able to upgrade for a small percentage of the intial purchase price.
Check it out, I think you will find it interesting. It doesn't apply to every piece of software that you buy, but it is a good way of getting people to start thinking about inherent value of a piece of software instead of how much it costs.

Calculating the True Price of Software


Alok

fuzzy said...

Good Stuff Alok - that deserves a blog post!