

The open-source entrepreneur - bensummers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/06/the_open_source_entrepreneur.html

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mapleoin
_Mr Young sold the software as fast as Mr Ewing could produce it._

Is this a metaphor gone wrong or just English humor?

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bensummers
I don't think it's English humour. Probably a journalist not understanding the
subject.

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RyanMcGreal
>Last year, Lulu created 400,000 titles and sold over 1.6 million books

So Lulu sold an average of four copies per title? I'd be interested to see a
chart of sales by title - I'm guessing it would be the mother of all zipf
distributions.

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mhd
A lot of Lulu customers don't market their books, they just use the service to
print private copies of family memoirs, documentation or other one-off
products. No break-out hits that I'm aware of. Some indy RPG publishers sell
reasonable numbers. Wil Wheaton's book ran pretty well...

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10ren
More power to Redhat and the value in open source. No need to oversell:

 _Today, the Redmond giant has seen its market share erode; Red Hat has become
the world's open-source leader._

Microsoft profit: $14,569 million
[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii)

Redhat profit: $87.25 million
[http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT&fstype=ii](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT&fstype=ii)

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rwmj
Bob Young notably said:

"One of the ideas behind Red Hat is to take a $10 billion market and turn it
into a $10 million market".

His point being that hiding the source creates the inefficiency of having to
get every little bug and feature fixed by the one company that has access to
the secret source. This inefficiency is lucrative if you're that one company,
but a vast drag on the economy for everyone else.

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rbanffy
It's very easy to see this as the destruction of value. Microsoft, certainly,
pushes this interpretation. Another way to see is that it's taking 10 billion
out of the cost of doing business. Those 10 billion will be translate into
more R&D, greener manufacturing or lower prices.

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c00p3r
The winner writes history. As I remember it could be described much simpler -
'we found a way how to monetize open source OS and powerful friends to promote
us (read: IBM) and arrange our IPO (big money)'.

Some might think after reading this article that Java was really open source
at that time. It wasn't until 2007, when everyone realized that the hype
started to decline. And it wasn't a part of RHEL/CentOS until 2008.

