OSS Trickle Down

If I understand I wrote that Red Hat is actually spending 3.1x on SG&A than on R&D, compared to an average of 2.6x across IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. On the surface, this could be a double whammy. First, there is less revenue going to established software vendors to pour into R&D, and second the R&D spending of established' OSS vendors is lower than the proportional R&D spending of their commercial competitors. One could argue that the net result of these two forces should be a reduction in innovation. (We are making the simplifying assumption that R&D investments result in innovations.) This is a situation where the Apache HTTP server inside of Gluecode Software. Through this acquisition, IBM was able to introduce WAS CE as a member of the WAS family allows IBM to compete against both commercial application server vendors (BEA) and open source application server vendors (Red Hat/JBoss) in situations where a customer is contemplating open source. So, instead of risking losing such a deal, IBM Is able to offer the customer WAS CE customer gets introduced to the rest of the WAS and IBM Software family of products, so the customer may end up purchasing one of those in the future (equaling more spending with IBM which can go towards future R&D). Open source and commercial software will continue to exist in a symbiotic relationship for the foreseeable future. The relationship will require commercial vendors to rethink their approaches to building everything vs. building differentiated value on an OSS foundation. And when commercial software vendors start altering their business models, OSS vendors won't be able to take a business as usual approach either. blog about enterprise open source topics.