LifeBeyondCode links to GapingVoid and asks “Why are open source people not ultra-rich yet?”
Uh, they are. The founders of Google are ultra-rich. As are the founders of Amazon, and ebay. On the closed source side, Larry Ellison doesn’t seem to be doing too bad, Steve Jobs does think differently, with a $1.00 salary, but it’s hard to miss that 4.9bn net worth, and then there’s always the elephant in the net-worth room to consider.
The interesting thing about making it big doesn’t appear to be the underlying technology you build on, but the value that you add. Google did search better than anyone. Oracle made the database that was used by the human genome project. Ebay let you sell anything to anyone, anywhere. And Microsoft made the os-dejure for consumer apps, and even made the most popular productivity suite, ever.
Even looking at the “B” list of Flickr, YouTube, Adobe, Symantec, SAP, Veritas, MySpace, etc, they all add value well beyond their infrastructure to the point where their infrastructure isn’t even apparent. They also have considerable intellectual property, and at the end of the day, they all charge someone for something.
April 26th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Good points there. I agree with you that there are many companies that are extremely successful by using the following combination
1. open source (tools to develop)
2. software as a service (delivery model)
3. offshore development (reduced costs)
4. virtual office (reduced costs again)
No question about that.
My post was related to companies that are trying to make money by implementing and supporting open source (there are a few hundred of them across the world)
My $.02 of course.
Best,
Raj
April 26th, 2007 at 5:10 am
In that case, look no further than the CEOs of IBM, Novel, and Sun.