Fred Domke, Left a comment against the post "Is Open-Source Software Wreckign Havoc on Software Industry", that though a lot of people are getting excited about Open source, he felt the question raised by Michael Jung from JPMorgan Partners is pretty important, the question "Is Open Source Really Just as Good?".

Summary of the post:
The nuance with open source is whether that 'something' is really 'just as good' as the alternatives. Bill Hilf, the head of Microsoft's open source strategy (yes, they do have an open source guru), I think put it correctly when he pointed out at our last CIO Council offsite that purchasing technology (software in his case) is more than just buying some code; it's really the ecosystem that you are buying. 'Just as good' as doesn't only mean feature parity, it means that the technology you deploy has a healthy ecosystem that keeps it going, and that you have the requisite skill in your company to use it to its greatest advantage and least headache.Companies that are building their businesses based on an open source strategy - Will there be lots of people who will know (or want to know) how to work with the technology, are there vendors who can provide great support, and is there a path of innovation that will help the ecosystem grow?

As the customer is twofold: first, existing vendors have to seriously rethink how much they are charging for their products, and two, long term, it means that companies will compete not only on features, but also on service and support.

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Now i would like to highlight a post by Jonathan Schwartz, which i is more driving home the point on the viability of open source / free software, SUN is a great example of open source leveraging an already existing "commercial software" ecosystem.

Excerpts from the post:

• Our announcement yesterday, to combine our Java Enterprise System into Solaris, and to deliver it all as free and open source software, has generated no small amount of buzz (If you want to know why I love blogs, it's because I can measure market reaction, almost immediately - developers, and folks writing blogs are, after all, the target demographic, not the media).
• Sun doesn't have a single customer, worldwide, that will run an unsupported product in their datacenter. Do such customers exist? Surely. They're called developers. Or startups. Or companies or economies that want to build their own internal support teams. That's the target for the Solaris Enterprise System. That's who uses free software without support contracts. And you're not going to win them over if you don't provide them with free and open source products. And if you don't provide them with the technology to use, they'll find someone else's free products.
• Opening up the Solaris Enterprise System, and giving it away for free, lowers the barrier to finding those opportunities. Free software creates volumes that lead the demand for deployments - which generate license and support revenues just as they did before the products were free. Free software grows revenue opportunities.
• Because no Fortune 2000 customer on earth is going to run the heart of their enterprise with products that don't have someone's home number on the other end. And no developer or developing nation, presented with an equivalent or better free and open source product, is going to opt for a proprietary alternative.
• Those two points are the market's reality. And having reviewed them today at length at a customer conference, with some of the largest telecommunications customers on earth, I only heard the strongest agreement. They all, after all, are prolific distributors of free handsets.

Prashanth RaiTag(s):Open+Source,JBOSS,Linux