>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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
Is this a metaphor gone wrong or just English humor?