[smackay]

The article touts the business model as the underlying failure of Open Source. However I think this is missing the forest for the trees. If you add up all the value that Open Source delivered by giving millions, yes, let's go for millions, of developers access to high quality tools that previously were only available as expensive, proprietary products then clearly the model has been a runaway success. The only lament would appear to be that the value was not captured by a single corporation.

I think the pendulum is now swinging back to the pre-PC days of large corporations, centralized control of technologies where only groups with large resources can participate. However that will only be a temporary phase until the next generation of mammals are able to come up with the tools to create competition once more and the whole cycle will repeat.

[vinceguidry]

The article didn't claim that OSS wasn't successful in the broader sense, just that in the business sense, the Red Hat business model has failed. It further points to a model that does work, SaaS.

[awkward]

It seems to be closer to saying that the Red Hat model - essentially being a professional scapegoat, with some consulting on the side - hasn't succeeded to keep up with the returns venture capitalism expects.

The flip side is that companies that take over the operations part of the value chain and not just corporate liability are fully able to compete with closed source companies, and that kind of hosted service is where corporate open source is likely to go.

[dragandj]

The article /does/ discuss that, and mentions that Open Source in the sense of software technology has been a huge success, but also that as a /business model/ is far, far, behind the proprietary models. It also mentions that there are another OS-based models that are successful, such as SaaS, cloud, etc.

[pjmlp]

Basically models where having partial access to the source code still doesn't provide a way to clone a product at zero cost.