Key Statements from Marten Mickos’ PARC Forum Talk

I just finished listening to Marten Mickos at PARC Forum on open source businesses. Below please find my list of key statements from this talk. Most are well-known, some remain controversial, however, as a researcher it is good to be able to pinpoint such statements.

  1. “Best way to serve open source is to make a ton of money on it.” @ 2:09min.
  2. “Open source is not a business model.” @ 6:13min.
  3. “Open source is a production and a distribution model.” @ 6:29min.
  4. “Open source is built on [...] people serving their own needs [...]” @ 9:24min.
  5. “[...] the engineering cost [...] is as high as for closed source companies [...] but you get much higher quality software much sooner.” @ 10:39min.
  6. “Marketing costs are significantly lower and go-to-market is significantly faster.” @ 11:20min.
  7. “Sales: there isn’t much of a difference.” @ 11:35min.
  8. “Some people spend time to save money, some spend money to save time.” @ 16:48min.
  9. “You get no benefit from open source if there is no community around it.” @ 20:20min.
  10. “How much [code] contributions do you get? [...] that's irrelevant." @ 20:40min.
  11. "The biggest competitor to us was our own open source version." @ 30:40min.
  12. "[Open source companies ...] have massive amounts of intellectual property, not just in the code they have." @ 39:06min.

While Marten touches on "civic benefits" at times, this talk is mostly a condensed review of commercial open source and a good reference from one of its foremost practitioners.

One thought on “Key Statements from Marten Mickos’ PARC Forum Talk

  1. Pingback: Links 12/4/2010: Awn 0.4.0, VP8 Becoming Free Software | Techrights

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