On 3/20/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Kieran Lal</b> <<a href="mailto:kieran@civicspacelabs.org">kieran@civicspacelabs.org</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><div><div>Most of IBM's profits in the $90 Billion+ in revenue come from their proprietary software. There are no plans to stop being one of the largest proprietary software vendors, and most profitable profitable software vendors.
</div></div></blockquote><div><br>absolutely, you are correct here: I simply meant (mainly for the reasons you describe very clearly below) that even they are taking advantage of the open source business model.<br></div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div> Among the reasons they support open source are:
<br><br>1) In industries they had lost, e.g. windows, open source would allow them to complete a solution stack, with linux, for their customers with ensuring their competitors did not have lock in control over IBM's customers.
<br><br>2) IBM's profitable solutions failed to attract talent the way Oracle lured DBAs, and Microsoft lured programmers. In order for IBM to compete they needed the talent to work on and support their solutions, and embracing open source was an effective talent rallying cry.
<br><br>3) IBM's unique support of hundreds, if not thousands of hardware systems meant the costs of maintaining compatibility across these systems was too great to be profitable and supported. Open source, was open and was architected to be platform agnostic which meant IBM could reduce their platform costs by phasing out proprietary OSes, and supporting mostly Linux and Windows as their customers wanted.
<br></div><br>The lessons to take away are: Can you fend off your competitors by reducing the competitive advantage to the cost of deployment? Can you acquire the talent you need to grow your business? Can you ensure you are not constrained by any one platform?
<br><br>Open sourcing your code give these three advantages.<br><br>Kieran<span class="q"><br><br></span></div></blockquote></div>