Another Case for Open Source

News: Beware of wolves in agnostic’s clothing: _“Consider the cost difference between producing useful software, and producing profitable retail software. To produce software, you need to develop the software, document it, and distribute it. In contrast, to make profitable software, add on these services: marketing, commercial distribution and retail channel development, package design and manufacture, sales, business development, advertising, public relations, and so on.

This multiplies the cost by approximately a factor of 10. Thus, 90 percent of the customer’s software dollar is not going to software development under the proprietary model. Open Source addresses this imbalance.”_ Bruce Perens makes an excellent point in this article. I made a case for using Open Source software in The Software Commons and the point about the cost of producing a profitable product is a great point I missed.