What do you think of this quote, that for Microsoft, "the threat that it faces is the erosion of the economic value of software being caused by the open source software movement."

Bold words, probably most open source developers wouldn't agree, but I see a lot of truth in them.

However I don't see much constructive in Stutz's jeremiad. It talks a lot about MS mistakes and what they shouldn't do. What should they be doing instead? Write software for "ad hoc collectives" with fine-grained concurrency? There's no market for such things, they don't even exist and may not be practical for a decade or more! What kind of advice is that for a 250 billion dollar company? That's like telling GM they ought to switch to making hover boards.

> Bold words, probably most open source developers wouldn't agree, but I see a lot of truth in them.

Actually, I remember back in the early 1990s Bob Young, then president of Red Hat, saying something to the effect that his job was to turn the $1 Billion OS market into a $100 Million dollar market. He knows there is an "erosion of economic value of software". He's counting on it.

Ah, here's a slightly later version of the quote

http://www.computingjapan.com/magazine/iss...May99/Interbob.html

Many are calling your company the next Microsoft and you the next Bill Gates. How do you like the comparison?

Young: It frustrates me because it is so fundamentally inaccurate. We cannot become the next Microsoft. Under the [open source] license that we deal in, there is just no opportunity for us there. We have a leadership opportunity, we don't have a control opportunity. Put it this way: If we are successful beyond our wildest dreams and took every single customer Bill Gates has away from him, we would successfully turn his $5 billion a year operating system business into something worth $500 million. Well, that's a big enough market for me.

I wouldn't term this the 'erosion of economic value'. There are two kinds of economic value: 'use value' and 'sale value'. It is abundantly clear to most within the FOSS community that sale value *is* being eroded, but use value is alive and well, and even on the upswing. Microsoft's strategy of increasing sale value even at the expense of use value is part of what is driving FOSS acceptance in businesses.

BTW, this version of Stutz's farewell memo is apparently the 'sanitized' one, according to this page:

http://www.synthesist.net/writing/

Boy, would I like to read the unsanitized verion!