2008 August | money news blog

28 08 2008

Quebec sued for not considering open source. Why this is bad policy

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Facil, a Quebec-based open-source organization, has sued the Quebec provincial government for buying Microsoft software without considering open-source software, as CBC reports. The problem, it seems, is that Quebec has an “open markets” policy that it is supposed to follow. In practice, however, the Quebec government IT buyers have been …

28 08 2008

Novell’s third-quarter loss widens, but Linux booms by 30 percent

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Novell beat Wall Street’s estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell’s third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007. The company …

28 08 2008

The problem with open-source revenue models

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Dennis Howlett writes a thought-provoking piece on proprietary maintenance revenue, challenging the value that software vendors provide or, rather, the generic way in which it is provided. Howlett proposes a way to customize maintenance fees to the actual value provided by a vendor:

In software terms, we already know that (differentiation for customers) happens through software implementation, configurations and customizations that are a core part of delivering to customer needs. There is no reason why the same principles can’t be applied to the maintenance element of the business relationship. If you stand back and put aside the notions of the last 30+ years, it is blindingly obvious.

It is obvious for example that in the early stages, customers will consume a considerable amount of resource(s) as they learn and become familiar with the product. They should therefore pay an economic price that reflects the services they consume. However, the software vendors need (to) do three things in order to soften the impact and reduce the long term burden…

I’ll leave it to you to read Howlett’s post to discover the three things, but even in the short blurb above Howlett unwittingly calls out a fundamental difficulty in open-source software revenue models, one that Savio Rodrigues has been banging on for a while, and one that NBC iVillage CTO Jon Williams has also called out:

Open-source vendors start making money from their customer base precisely at the point that the customer base is least prone to renew.

… Source:The Open Road

28 08 2008

Microsoft surpasses Google…in stock performance

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Paul Kedrosky notices an impressive feat for Microsoft: for the first time in a long time, its stock has outperformed Google’s this week, this month, and this year.

Granted, this is like calling Microsoft the sexiest nun in the convent, given how poor its performance has been, but it’…

27 08 2008

WILMINGTON FINANCE

Posted by: admin in Financial News

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27 08 2008

Want to be a music industry mogul? Here’s your chance

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Have you always wanted to be the antagonist in Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar“? Now’s your chance.

A new U.K. venture, Bandstocks, is making mini-moguls of the music masses, allowing people to invest in up-and-coming bands and share in the proceeds. Bandstocks joins a small but growing group of related companies . …

27 08 2008

The significance of enterprise contributions to Eclipse

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

I received an interesting email this day from the Eclipse Foundation, interesting because it cut against an experience I had at work, and against Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s evangelism to convince more enterprises to contribute to open-source software projects.

I’m aware of a number of mission-critical applications happily …

27 08 2008

Want to be a music industry mogul? Here’s your chance

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

Have you always wanted to be the antagonist in Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar“? Now’s your chance.

A new U.K. venture, Bandstocks, is making mini-moguls of the music masses, allowing people to invest in up-and-coming bands and share in the proceeds. Bandstocks joins a small but growing group of related companies . …

27 08 2008

Desktop Linux proves its mettle in emerging markets

Posted by: admin in Business and Politics

While I’m not much of a desktop Linux cheerleader, I found this news that the Philippines has rolled out 23,000 Linux desktops to schools very interesting, particularly when read in conjunction with commentary from Malaysia.

The net? Microsoft is heavily subsidizing Windows and Office to keep Linux out, but Linux is proving cheaper (”Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper”) and at least as easy as Windows to use.

In fact, the cost savings from Linux have been so substantial that the Philippines is rolling out its Linux desktop program beyond the 30,000 existing seats, and was even able to purchase an additional 3,000 seats for government use. The rationale is clear:

… Source:The Open Road