From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-07-23T22:41:54+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Editor Alex Young wrote: > I wasn't talking about independent developers > specifically, but what reason is there that MySQL's business model > couldn't scale down? Lots of reasons ... look up "barriers to entry" in any MBA textbook. > Besides, it doesn't really matter if you don't like this particular open > source business model. There are plenty of others. There are plenty of business models. There are many fewer *profitable* business models, and almost all of them require that a product or service *exist* and outrank its competitors on important *non-price* differentiators of quality as perceived by customers. MySQL is a good example ... many database gurus would tell you that it's technically lame relative to Oracle, SQL Server/Sybase, DB2, Informix and PostgreSQL. But both as an open source project and a business it is thriving. Red Hat is another good example of a thriving open source business model. However, in the case of RHEL, I would argue that it *is* technologically superior to its competition, with the possible exception of Solaris. There just isn't another server OS out there that runs on commodity hardware with that level of security, reliability and performance. Bringing this back to Ruby, I'd say there's another good example of a thriving open source business model walking this very forum -- Sun's jRuby project, and for that matter, the underlying JVM. Remember, I'm one of those folks who think virtual machines are the tools of Satan and that *real* language implementers don't need them for either portability or performance. :)