Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has weighed into the open-source billionaire debate with a great piece on where to find the open-source billionaires. Steven notes that one place to look is Google and other companies that depend upon open source to build their businesses, but his analysis goes a bit deeper:
Developers can make millions, even hundreds of millions, but technical brilliance almost never come with the business genius and/or amorality required to make billions. They're really completely different skills sets....
The open-source developers become millionaires. The old-school hardware, Sun; software, Novell; and Internet, Yahoo companies take a major step towards open source. Everybody's happy....
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Juliette Binoche
(Credit: Wikicommons)Yesterday when going through Passport Control to board the Eurostar, I bumped into Juliette Binoche (of Chocolat fame) (or someone who looks and speaks exactly like her).
Whatever my kids might think, having one's picture on the Internet does not make someone famous. Not even their dad. Just ask Juliette.
I bumped into her when getting into the short line. She turned, looked at me, and then called to her friend in front of me in the line,
I think I'll just go to the executive lounge, instead.
...where I could not go, as she was in First Class and I was in Unwashed Masses Class. I should have told her not to bother - I'm happily married.
But I bet she would have wanted to talk to me in line if I were a billionaire. :-)
Bernard Golden almost certainly hits it spot on when he suggests that we won't have any open-source billionaires, per se, but rather billionaires built on the foundation of open source. He doesn't come out and say it, but I suspect he has Google, Digg, and others like this in mind - companies that depend fundamentally on open source, yet aren't open-source companies, per se.
Because the cost of software has plummeted, new companies are being formed that take advantage of open source to create new offerings -- and these new companies will build enormous fortunes on the back of open source. I refer to this phenomena as "the migration of margin."
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Of course, it's all relative, as The Register points out in citing an article from The Times on Ballmer's pay relative to Larry Ellison's.
As The Register notes:
Ballmer got a pay package worth a paltry $1.3m. The poor little rich boy received a salary of only $620,000 and a $650,000 bonus. He's practically a monk. What could motivate a man to wake up each morning knowing he could afford only a medium-sized fleet of solid gold luxury jets? His [9].3 per cent of Microsoft shares.
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