
The Danger of Free - terpua
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_danger_of_free.php
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bayareaguy
Only silly companies compete with free. The smart ones partner with it.

Consider the Eclipse example:

 _Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging, testing and
profiling Java code are not great. But they are good enough because they are
free. Companies could no longer justify paying for products from, for example,
Borland and as a result, IBM's strategy worked beautifully_

I guess he doesn't know about Builder 2007:
<http://www.codegear.com/products/jbuilder>

_Builder 2007 is an IDE built on the open source Eclipse framework, which
makes development ..._

So here you have IBM and Borland both leveraging the same open source
framework.

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Tichy
I think arguments of the form "low prices destroyed business x" are complete
nonsense. Apparently business x didn't deliver anything that people wanted
enough to pay for, given the alternatives. That is all there is to it.

