Comments on: Open Source: Why BusinessWeek is Wrong And Compiere Is Right

By: ERP and CRM Business Solutions - Topic Research, Trends and Surveys

ERP and CRM Business Solutions - Topic Research, Trends and Surveys — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:28:05 +0000

[...] service, training and … Read More RECOMMENDED BOOKS REVIEWS AND OPINIONS Open Source: Why BusinessWeek Is Wrong And Compiere Is Right | The … BusinessWeek says open source companies are struggling to monetize their products and show [...]

By: Ethan Austin

Ethan Austin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:28:25 +0000

I completely agree with the statement above.
“Open source isn’t about low costs. It’s about freedom, flexibility, scalability, reliability and innovation. Oh, and the lower costs are a nice bonus.”
While companies do save significant money avoiding license fees with open source, the biggest advantages are freedom, flexibility and scalability. Idalica has scores of customers that approach us because of the difficulty if not impossibility to make their proprietary ERP do what they need.

By: Geoffrey Mobisson (Levementum)

Geoffrey Mobisson (Levementum) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:52:50 +0000

If you’re looking for another model of success in the Commercial Open Source domain, look no further than SugarCRM. A key differentiator in Sugar’s model, relative to some of the other players out there, is their agressive and opprtunistic tactic relative to squeezing as much value out of the product as possible. They offer training progams, a SAAS model, pre-loaded appliances…and perhaps most importantly, they tout interoperability and alliances with other Open Source players…like Jaspersoft. Furthermore they provide a greenhouse for other providers. Why is this important – because it attracts enterprises..and enterprises recognize the need for change management, integration, training, strategy, etc (and they ARE willing to pay for software). All of these provide “typical” opportunities to generate revenue.

There are other good examples as well – Alfresco, Mule, etc.

*** I’m working with one of the VARs in your list (Levementum)…and its committed (re: betting on) the steady growth of Open Source in the Entetprise. We’ve partnered with both Compiere and SugarCRM.

By: The VAR Guy

The VAR Guy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:04:37 +0000

@Axel: The VAR Guy agrees … lots of folks are spending money directly (or indirectly) on open source. BusinessWeek raised an interesting point, tho, suggesting that traditional companies (IBM, Oracle) are benefiting most from open source-related sales. The VAR Guy agrees. However, he doesn’t believe BusinessWeek’s thesis that Red Hat faces a growth challenge. They company will grow, and grow. And grow.

@Asterisk Fan: Agreed, Digium and Asterisk are super-hot.

By: Axel Winter

Axel Winter — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:56:07 +0000

Well, I think there are much more open source companies and they make plenty of money on it. Accenture, IBM, Bearing Point – they all develop applications needing significant opens source prodcuts to make and sell their products (eclipse, jboss, netbeans, glassfish, etc). Look at IBM selling Linux for the Mainframe vs zOS to breath new air into the mf architecture …

Open source is not only there for redhat to make money out of it, thats just one aspects. Even take the Fortune 500 Corporations who run serious portions of their systems with and on open source. How much money the make out of using open source?

In summary you would see the open source market/industry making XX BN USD

By: Asterisk Fan

Asterisk Fan — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:30:46 +0000

Digium is the one open source company best positioned to prove BusinessWeek wrong.