If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail? A few years back, a host of open-source businesses raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise that they would commoditize old, dying markets, and make a bundle of money in the process. Missing from this thesis, however, was its logical conclusion: winning in a fading market is tantamount to losing, as the …
You may be the most innovative company on our solar system and you can invade any market you might please but you will not have the slightest chance of success if you don't find a way to lock-in your customers, twist their arms and squeeze their wallets into a (I love these words) sustained revenue stream. Trumpeting the words Open Source (or at least Open) whenever you describe the objectives/products of your company can be a valuable tactic to divert the attention of your potential customers while you're preparing to lock them in. The reference to Red Hat here in this context works as a smoke screen.
There, Mr. Asay, you didn't have to waste all those heavy marketing-speak words.
I'll attempt to translate from what Asay said, to what Asay should have said if he only knew the words:
You can be the best open-source coat tails surfer in all of the inter tubes, but unless you've got the business nous to set the road between the new users you've acquired and the inevitable and required investment in research and development... then what you've done is commodised the market to a standstill.
It's your business's choice if it wants to pass money from over charging support services to the programmers (al la Red Hat), or if it wants to simply advertise and accept development jobs directly (Most smaller foss businesses), but the point is clear that you can't just have an eternal 'tin of beans' in software that you keep on re-selling.
To state what *should* be bloody obvious, there's nothing wrong with open sourcing an old market provided :
1) You have your fingers in more than one pie, or use your income to exploit another dying market, as eventually the old market will die
2) Money is made from the services associated with the open source, customisation, etc.
It's business. If you can make money at it - why not? Don't sniff at CA because they're picking up products in decline. If CA are consistently making money with that strategy, than even if it's not sexy and new is it sensible to knock them? Really?
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Isn't everything in that article just saying that the problems of open-source gaming are applicable to all open source?
IE. You guys may be good at cloning existing software, but as most of you don't have a clue how to come up with anything new, only like 3 of you will ever amount to a hill of beans?
Actually regarding Gnu/linux as a platform for indie gaming there are some amazing titles on the humble indie bundle. World of goo alone is better than nearly anything big label I've seen recently.
http://www.humblebundle.com/
The pay what you like model used also raised quite a lot of cash for charity and developers, and the Gnu/Linux users donations were roughly twice as much as the windows/osx users.
You've got to be kidding. Proprietary game studios are highly derivative all copying each other and trying to be the first to reach the same cliff so that they can all jump over. Generally, commercial game studios have NOTHING on Free Software when it comes to creativity. Most just redo the same tired ideas or milk the same franchise year after year.
The new catch phrase, cloud computing, appears to me to just another name for VPN. Or distributive storage. Or any other technology IBM, Ingersoll-Rand, Honeywell and others had back in the days of mainframe iron. And anyone who is stupid enough to put any data out in the wild for the world to hack and steal deserves what they get.
The article appears to be answering the wrong question: How can an open source operation grow to be as big as the current proprietary tech giants?
or maybe (reading between the lines) how can I become the next Bill Gates?
or perhaps more accurately: How can I work like stink on something I hate for a short time then sit back and watch my Lear Jet fund grow.
The real point is there are people with other goals.
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