Are Firms Leery of Open Source Servers?

If you run your business using Microsoft’s Windows server OSes, then you really don’t have to worry. The Redmond giant is rolling in cash thanks in no small part to the high prices it charges for its desktop and server OSes and the client access licenses it requires to connect one to the other.

But open source companies are different. They don’t sell their open source software per se, and therefore they don’t make a lot of money. Peter Wayner over at InfoWorld wrote recently about two highly valued open source companies: MySQL, which Sun bought for $1 billion, and Red Hat, currently valued by the market at around $6 billion. This was what he had to say:

Yet for all of this wealth, there’s a feeling that these businesses succeeded by being hybrids. They use the open source vision to attract users, but their business success comes by pushing proprietary options. Thus, the dark secret is that their open source version are merely a form of marketing.

Read the rest at ServerWatch.