Open Source: It's all LinkedIn

Posted by Penguin on Jul 7, 2010 3:44 PM EDT
Computerworld UK; By Glyn Moody 		Mail this story
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As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.

But there's another, and it's why I was careful to talk about “pure” free software outfits: because there is a further group whose business models depend critically on open source, but most people are unaware of this when they use their products. These are the Googles of the world, who deploy free software to create massive back-end infrastructure that would be simply unaffordable using traditional software.

That, in its turn, has allowed all kinds of new businesses to be created that hitherto would not be economically viable. Alongside Google, there is Facebook and Twitter, both of whom have been vocal in their support of the software they depend on.

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