From: "Benjamin J. Tilly" Date: 2001-05-30T09:12:33+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:15981] Re: Ruby Standard and Enterprise Edition Lothar Scholz wrote: >On Wed, 30 May 2001 07:44:58 +0900, Glen Starchman > wrote: [...] >I think the currently nobody should think about starting an open souce >company, because nearly all attempts to do so failed. Only some big >companies are still alive but only because they have some very big >customers which you can't reach with a) ruby b) a small startup c) >without reputation. I think you are mistaken. Facts. Most attempts to found companies fail. Badly. The dotcom disaster was predictable and widely predicted a long time ago. Off of the top of my head, the following small companies are based on open source and as far as I know are doing just fine: Loki, Crynwr, Sleepycat, Stonehenge, Ars Digita, Scyld, Aladdin... In fact I do not at this point have a strong opinion on whether it is better for a software company to aim or not aim for an open source business model of some kind. But I think that it would be foolish for a small software company to not investigate how it can use open-source technologies to cut costs. I further think that competing head on with open source solutions is something to think twice about... Cheers, Ben