Quote:
Originally Posted by candybar
I think you know all this but a general version of daveT's sentiment is increasingly widely shared among technologists and not at all different from how you feel about Oracle, etc. Because of this, in many markets, closed-source is not even an option for new products - good luck marketing new closed-source database management systems, web frameworks, or language implementations. The market for system software used directly by developers is increasingly bifurcated into open-source and SaaS - a closed-source license just doesn't make a lot of sense except for incumbents and even Microsoft seems committed to moving in this direction.
Without doing a whole lot of in depth thinking about it - I think daveT's sentiments are mostly unrelated to the examples here. The motivations of both buyers and sellers in these examples are pretty complex and based on a lot of practical things unrelated to the belief that they should have some set of inherent rights as consumers.
Just as one example, DBMS, web frameworks, languages, are all, at their core tools. The 'problems' they're solving are providing building blocks that are to be used to solve other custom problems. For this type of use case the ability of the purchaser to customize the product is an extremely high value feature - since the problems they're solving are generally quite unique. There's also value in the provider of the solution to make it open source because they get free community development effort to improve their product.
This is very different than a more end-user/consumer focused product where you're building a solution to solve a specific problem. An example off the top of my head is a security company we dealt with recently that was building software that added a type of security layer on top of your infrastructure. In that case they're solving a very specific problem and if they opened up their software it would be trivial for other people to copy and severely hurt their business.