Looking for new business oportunities

[John Gill]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Robert Brockway
<robert at timetraveller.org>wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Darryl Moore wrote:
>
> > support them as Microsoft can. However, if I can partner with a number
> > of other companies doing the same thing and if I can become an Ubuntu
> > partner myself, then I should be able to demonstrate that even if I am
> > not around, then at least someone capable of supporting them will be.
>
> Hi Darryl.  Demonstrating future support should be the easiest part of
> selling OSS.  With OSS any company with the requisite skills can _become_
> the vendor.  This is an opportunity that thousands of companies world wide
> have picked up on.
>
> Using proprietory software carries the risk that if the vendor goes out of
> business or just decides to drop or reduce support for the tool the client
> be in trouble.  This isn't theoretical - it has happened many times.


Further, in many cases the vendor is the only one with access to source
code, so anyone else who tries to provide support is doing so with one hand
tied behind their back.   In many cases, the result is complete vendor lock
in and dependency.

With open source anyone can set up to provide top quality support, with
access to source code.   The whole system scales beautifully, if there is a
big demand for support, people can step in to provide it.

The tricky bit is picking the right tools, ones with a reasonable user base,
so you don't end up having to support the entire thing yourself (but note
this is no different to the proprietary situation where you really don't
want to be the only user ;)

John
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