I'm probably crazy for trying to breach this topic on a forum. It probably would take a very well thought out blog post to get my point across. But, this topi

I'm probably crazy for trying to breach this topic on a forum. It probably would take a very well thought out blog post to get my point across. But, this topic touches on a very important issue in software we face right now. Over the lifetime of the software industry we've experimented with lots of interesting business models. Some have panned out better than others. My suspicion is that selling software has been the most profitable. Preliminary evidence from iPhone app store has seemed to agree this as well. Prior to 2000 IT industry was making large sums of money mainly from selling software. After the dot com bubble lots of companies selling software took a hit too. The bust wasn't limited to the web. Lots of customers realized they weren't getting the ROI from the software they purchased. Since then the industry fundamentally shifted. The rise of open source software started to replace previously commercial software. In many respects were much better in quality than commercial software. Linux was making serious advances towards Microsoft's dominance in the server market. And, since then open source software has matured and has advanced rapidly into markets previously dominated by commercial software vendors. Once open source software options come into these markets they exert serious downward pressure on the ability for commercial companies to stay viable. Take for example BEA. In early 2000's BEA was a market leader with it's Java application server. In fact BEA was the fastest growing software company ever, and I think that's still true. Over $1 Billion in sales in under 5 years. Amazing. Then JBoss showed up. In many respects JBoss' application server was superior to BEA's. Once JBoss came in they created serious pressure on BEA's ability to sell their server. Why purchase BEA when you can get a better server for free? In the end both companies were sold. Red hat bought JBoss for around $350-$400 million. Oracle snapped up BEA for $7 Billion. Open source has proven itself as the best way to build software. However, it's the worst way to monetize it. Selling software works.