Comments on: The community made me proprietary

Why good open-source companies turn to proprietary value to make a living.

[arjenlentz]

Nah, I don't agree.

Services are not proprietary, they just are.
There could be proprietary tools involved, but not necessarily.

Many vendors think in terms of "leverage" and "force" when they look at their (potential) users and customers. I would suggest that's one aspect of what's wrong with their approach. It uses the angle of somehow extracting sales and profit out of the users, rather than thinking about what the actual value of the proposition FOR THE USER might be. What results are -let's put this clearly- very sucky offerings, that benefit the vendor but not the users. En thus, more "force" is needed, and it just gets worse.

One possibly nicer way of looking at this, is not to think in terms of taking away or withholding, but in terms of added benefits of an auxiliary service or product. If there's sufficient benefit for enough people, you have a viable offering. If not, then keep on thinking and try a few more things - few offerings get it right first time!

[ckurowic]

Ubuntu's business model is providing support for their product. I'm not necessarily knocking them, I think Ubuntu is a decent OS, but it concerns me when your sole source of income is providing help for end users. That provides an incentive for the makers of Ubuntu to purposely code in flaws. I'm not accusing them, but people respond to incentives (basic economics principle).

[Matt Asay]

Mark (Shuttleworth) would agree with you. That's why he's looking for alternative (non-support) ways to make money. Keep the software free but find some ancillary value people will pay for. Sort of like Google with advertising. I hope he succeeds.

[ckurowic]

This is why I digg Apple so much. We've got the proprietary AND open source thing going on. The stuff works well and yet comes from open source roots.