Re: How Open Source software developers pay the bills, from within a successful such operation (was): Open Source: in conflict with the development process in the Ada community?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Then maybe we're in violent agreement. I don't doubt that having open source
might make for building a fire under a company to continue to provide
support and innovate because the barriers to entry are lower for someone
else to come along and do so as well. Its possible that this is a critical
selling point to the end customer - depending on the product and customer.

I'd continue to contend that the barriers are not infinite even without open
source - just higher. And even Microsoft with large resources and high
barriers to competitors are not in a position to avoid innovation. They have
to at least do what the car companies do with model year changes - keep the
guts unchanged but bend the sheet metal a little different - or nobody wants
to buy the next generation.

As for the wisdom of that strategy? ACT seems to be making it work and other
companies have been successful by adopting a rapid-innovation and
customer-centric approach. Other companies have been successful for long
stretches of time without changing their products much at all (witness the
VW Beetle). So the answer seems to be - as with many things in life - "It
Depends". Is open source critical to that success? Maybe. Maybe its just the
current software-buyer's fad - like tailfins. Maybe it depends on the
product at hand. In any case, its hard to argue with success.

Incidentally, I had not heard it called "bottom feeding". I've heard it
called "milking the cash cow". Bottom feeding is what I've associated with a
stock-buying strategy - find hurting to bankrupt companies and buy the stock
for less than the liquidation value. But I could see how a twist of the
phrase could apply to scouring up the crumbs of business left with a product
as it decays.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Robert Dewar" <dewar@gnat.com> wrote in message
news:5ee5b646.0204230444.6684ac@posting.google.com...
>
> You miss the point. Of course this (behavior commonly referred to as
> "bottom feeding") cannot persist for long with respect to a particular
> product, but it is remarkably common for a company with a proprietary