

The Myth of the Open Source Business Model - Anon84
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/12/27/TheMythOfTheOpenSourceBusinessModel.aspx

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mechanical_fish
_Either way, the developers of World of Goo are still screwed._

"Screwed" relative to what? The cloud-cuckoo-land business model where they
have the same development and distribution costs and the same marketing
effectiveness but a 0% piracy rate? _That plan only works in your
imagination._

Seems to me that the _World of Goo_ developers might be doing pretty well by
their business model. They've got 10% of their users paying $15. If they'd
made an iPhone app 100% of their users would be paying something... but how
much smaller is the universe of users, and would they have built as big an
audience in that universe if they had charged $15 for a game? Here's something
claiming to be a bestseller list:

<http://thumblounge.com/topapps/>

SimCity for iPhone seems to be pulling in $10 a unit... but SimCity is a
legendary existing brand with no marketing problems. Somewhat obscurer games
-- which nonetheless have pretty well-known existing brands -- are Enigmo and
Bejeweled, which are charging $2 each. So: much less revenue per user, smaller
potential universe of users, but a much lower piracy rate. Does it pay off?
Should _every_ new game be exclusive to the iPhone, now?

Now factor in this: Which game developers are now in a great position to get
some big game company to sign a contract for the Wii, PS3, or XBox rights --
or to _port_ their game to iPhone and leverage their piracy-built brand to get
lots of people to pay $4.99 to play it again? Is it worth allowing pirates to
copy your game onto half the machines in the world if _one_ of those machines
happens to be sitting near a manager at Electronic Arts?

I don't know the answers to these questions. But they would be interesting to
explore. Without doing so, sitting around and complaining about the
"unfairness" of a 90% piracy rate is just an unenlightening fantasy exercise,
like imagining how much better you could fight if you were Colossus from the
X-Men.

------
nailer
"For developers of shrinkwrapped software, Open Source only turns piracy from
a problem into a benefit if you're willing to forego building consumer
software and you have software that is either too complicated to use without
handholding"

I've worked in the largest bank & largest telco in a country, and the largest
hedge fund in the world. All three paid substantial licenses to Red Hat. In no
case was that license paid for hand holding. Either my experiences over the
last decade are completely unusual or the author is talking out of his ass.

"OR you can scare a large percentage of your customers into buying traditional
software licenses by using the GPL instead of the BSDL."

How does the GPL scare customers in a way that the BSDL does not? This is a
big claim to make without supporting arguments.

That the author doesn't seem to be bothered to spell 'Red Hat' correctly
points in the same direction as the other two points. This article is trash.

~~~
brl
"How does the GPL scare customers in a way that the BSDL does not? This is a
big claim to make without supporting arguments."

That's easy to support. The GPL wing of the free software movement is famous
for being unreasonably prone to solving conflicts with litigation. They are
also famous for going to extreme lengths to dig up evidence that somebody is
committing a 'crime' against their licensing ideology.

The academic license community (BSD, MIT, etc) on the other hand rarely if
ever enforce their licenses in any formal way. They especially don't end up in
court over it!

~~~
nailer
You are provably wrong on every point you just made.

1\. The GPL is not a wing of a movement. It is a license.

2\. The license isn't an ideology, it's an agreement willingly entered into by
people who wish to use the FSF's copywritten creations. If people don't wish
to use the FSF's copywritten creations, they do not have to license the
software.

3\. The majority of conflicts have been resolved without litigation - in fact
you'll find the FSF has only recently litigated a company for the first time
ever, despite existing for a couple of decades. Even in that case (Cisco
Systems), this was after years of attempting to negotiate out of court.

BSD and MIT licenses have only provided a wealth of 'do what you want' source
code with a license requiring little more than attribution. The major
beneficiaries of BSD licenses have been Sun, Microsoft, and NetApp. If BSD
licensing were a successful basis for growing software, every startup wouldn't
be running on Linux, as Linux wouldn't exist. But it isn't, so they nearly
always are.

In short: grow up hippy, I ain't giving you source code for free.

