Jonathan Schwartz of Sun writes:
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.
Opening up Solaris and giving it away for free has led to the single largest wave of adoption Solaris has ever seen – some 3.4 million licenses since February this year (most on HP, curiously). It’s been combined with the single largest expansion in its revenue base. I believe the same will apply to the Java Enterprise System, its identity management and business integration suites specifically. Why?
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.
Betting against FOSS is like betting against gravity. And free software doesn’t mean no revenue, it means no barriers to revenue. Just ask your carrier.
