We all see what is happening in US and many countries around the world. Inflation, deflation, stagnation that are the normal processes now and even the US $ is falling down. But how this will hurt the open source companies? I think they all actually will benefit from this situation. While the closed source companies earn their money from selling of licenses the open source companies sell services and support. So, in that way the client is probably more willing to take a qualified support instead to buy a license.
But the real danger to all closed source companies is the economic crisis. Such a crisis reflects immediately to the client’s pocket and that reflects to the company. So, a company that make open source product has lower expenses because of the support and contributions of the community. For example if there are two operating systems on the market, a closed one and an open one. The close one has price of $200 and the open about $50 guess what will choose the customer.
So, in future the market will be more friendly and more friendly to the open source companies because of the cheaper products they could offer. But let’s take a look to the nowadays. Why GNU/Linux and friend are not big guns in the desktop market? Because of the advertisement. I have a look about some of the paid distributions and I think they all have lack of advertisement to the mass customer. They just do not advertise their products enough. That’s it. So, I would say “Keep working all you open source companies! You may have a difficult time now but the future is yours.”
And that is not all. There is some main target markets for the open source companies – support and services for a particular distribution, applications and selling gadgets. The “gadgets” is business is not so serious but it definitely earns some money. So, I will take a look about the support and services for a distribution and application. The user base is growing fast and if 1 year ago the gnu/linux users were 1000, so today they are 1500 (for example of course, we all know they are many thousands if not millions). That means the market for the above 2 areas is growing too. And if the other closed-source companies have difficult moment because of the crisis that is not so important for the open source companies. They have growing user base and that means growing market and more money for them. Lucky you, open source firms!
Posted by mhydra 