Commercial open source firms go to market trying to create an “unfair” competitive advantage that lets them win customers more easily than their competitors. So do most other companies. Commercial open source firms do this by bypassing the traditional purchasing process by getting their software into customer companies for free, before the customers even know they will need the software. But is an employee’s decision to install a piece of open source software a good decision for the company? After all, every software locks in its users, whether open source or not.
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1 PostgreSQL Replication and Conflict of Interest in Open Source // Jun 3, 2008 at 12:17
[...] a free PostgreSQL version installed and used in as many IT departments as possible, because it is the first (and important) step to a later sale, as I have discussed elsewhere. Enhancing the free product achieves exactly [...]
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