Differences between current version and predecessor to the previous major change of MarketFragmentation.
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| Newer page: | version 10 | Last edited on Thursday, July 9, 2009 9:05:33 pm | by LawrenceDoliveiro | |
| Older page: | version 7 | Last edited on Monday, June 1, 2009 4:01:58 pm | by LawrenceDoliveiro | Revert |
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With FreeSoftware on the other hand, the fixed cost can be spread out in a number of ways, by reusing code from other projects, and relying on a large pool of contributors to divide up the work between them. This low fixed cost makes it very easy for new players to enter the market: instead of having to develop their products completely from scratch, they can build on work that someone else has done, and just put their own innovative variations on top.
For another example, consider the market for passenger cars: there are dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of models and variations thereon, yet nobody claims that this profusion is “fragmenting the market” or “putting off car buyers”. No single vendor or model dominates the market: their costs are such that most of their models can make a comfortable profit selling just a few hundred thousand units per year worldwide.
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+And just as with cars, there is no VendorLockIn: if you’re not satisfied with one FreeSoftware support vendor, the cost of moving to another one is nowhere near as great as the cost of moving from one [Proprietary] software product to another.
Thus, the Free Software world will never create a company as large as Microsoft or Adobe. But it will sustain a lot of smaller ones. Think of this as a good thing, not a bad thing.
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CategoryEconomics
