Newsflash. The problem isn't open source. Running a successful business is hard. But there are success stories. IBM spent $37 billion last year to buy Red H

Newsflash. The problem isn't open source. Running a successful business is hard. But there are success stories. IBM spent $37 billion last year to buy Red Hat. Microsoft has invested a huge amount into open source. Oracle keeps on buying open source products. Most of the best successes are not pure open source plays. What you do is invest in open source for the complements to your main product, then charge more for your product. Companies and people start with a problem that they are willing to pay about $X for a solution to. They don't care about how that $X is divided up. So if some of the pieces are free, then others can cost more. Oracle's investment in Linux 20 years ago serves as a demonstration. They invested in making Oracle run well on Linux, and pushed Linux over Sun. But if you tried to run Oracle on Linux, your license fee was higher. However it was cheaper than paying for Sun and paying for Oracle. The result? People switched to Linux and Oracle made more money.