The Open Code Market

Dear all,

I would like to inform you that the Magazine First Monday
(www.firstmonday.org) has published one paper I wrote on the business side
of Open Source titled "The Open Code Market". You may find the paper here:
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_11/munoz/index.html

In short, The Open Code Market (OCM) is both an open market for code, as
well as a market for open code. However, it aims mainly to become a free
market for software, as well as a market for Free Software. The OCM
introduces into the Free/Open Source movement an economic incentive, to help
align the priorities of Free/Open Source developers with those of the end
users.

Between the final draft and publication, I received valuable comments on the
idea, including those of Rob "Roblimo" Miller, Jeff "Hemos" Bates, Phillipe
Agrain, Richard Stallman, Miguel de Icaza, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, David Wheeler
and many others to whom I am indebted, since they spent some of their
valuable time reading the paper and making nisightful comments.

Some of them led me to an earlier similar effort by Brian Behlendorf named
SourceXchange.com. Brian's experience was probably the most valuable, since
he had gone through the the actual proces of running a project similar to
what I am proposing.

His main line was that, a) while the enterprise made profits, it did not
reach the levels of profitability that were expected in the middle of the
dot.com boom, and investors looked for other (more lucrative investments)
b) That the dot.com boom also addedd costs (high salaries, etc) to his
attempt and c) that it is difficult to commoditise software creation due to
the uncertainties over time / effort required to write the software and the
difficulty of the role of "project manager".

My line on all this is that
- the project may be easier to develop now as expectations for profits (and
costs) have decreased. And that baseing the market on low-cost countries
(i.e. India, Vietnam, etc.) may further help take off.

- I expect that the market will really take off as Open Source (linux in
particular) moves to the mass market of the desktop, thus generating the
necessary economies of scale, visibility and consumer-mass.

Kind regards to all. I hope you find the paper interesting

Jordi

To facilitate co-ordination regarding the introduction of OSS SW in Vietnam

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