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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2012 @ 01:04 PM EDT |
Well. Part of the case had to be about trading tiny amounts
of money for a shot at a lot of cash. Even though the case
didn't have a lot of merit, jury trials and judges are a bit
random - so the case could have turned out differently.
Another big part of it is absolutely fear of Google's
business model. I'm not sure it is exactly about open
source. The way I had it explained to me...Google's business
is search/advertising (closed-source). Most of Google's
remaining software efforts are deployments intended to
render it impossible to create a true competing business by
eliminating any large for-pay user bases. So, they're
giving away email, and word processors, and GPS, and social
networks, and mobile OS, and local OS, and disk storage and
paying for those businesses with advertising.
Any competing business would need to make massive
investments in order to give software away for free and hope
to start up a viable advertising business later. This is a
hard sell for investors.
Long-term, Google will probably succeed in turning software
development into a low-margin business - like everything
else. Realistically, they generate enough cash to defend
their search business by developing and giving away every
major mass-market software category. Eg., I forsee Google
Apps moving into small business accounting within a few
years. This trend will be good for consumers, but very bad
for M$ and Oracle.
However, even though Google seems friendly to open-source, I
suspect that the concern experienced by M$ and Oracle is not
so much open-source as free+advertising driven software.
--Erwin
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