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Can open source and capitalism co-exist?
Feb. 08, 2008

Blog: For some reason, people still can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you can make money, big money, from FOSS (Free Software/Open Source). It's a pity that more of them couldn't have been in New York City this week for the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.

While I wasn't there, eWEEK's Peter Galli was, and he caught a fascinating panel discussion on the question: "Are Open Source and Capitalism Worlds Apart?" What I found especially interesting was that the people on this panel were not from Red Hat, MySQL or Trolltech.

No, these were not the people who had built open-source software and then cashed in on it; these were people who invested in companies that use open source and its ideas.

In other words, these were money people, not technology people. At heart, they could care less about the technical issues so near and dear to many a Linux fan's heart. They get excited about how changes in the tax code might affect capital gains instead of how changes in the kernel might effect virtualization.

So, why do they care? Because open source makes money. In my favorite quote from the panel, Stephen Bate, vice president of software development at FOLIOfn, an online brokerage firm, said, "Open source helps people get to market faster and in many cases lowers the cost."

Exactly.

And that's why FOSS is becoming ever more important not just in technology, but in a whole economy that runs on technology.


Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols



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