Donald Smith responds to Matt Asay’s post on the “we’ll figure it out later” approach adopted by many open source organizations today.

Matt compares the pre-dot-com-bust to state of things today. “In the pre-dot-com-bust, the approach was ‘just get lots of people to visit our site and we’ll figure out how to monetize it later’. Today, organizations seem to have been duped into believing that software has a negative marginal cost. ‘Just get your brand on as many desktops as possible and you will figure out how to monetize it later’ is their approach today,” Matt says.

Donald agrees, but adds that a few organizations are going beyond the “we’ll figure it out later approach” and are concentrating on building a sound business model. “It is more than coincidence that these organizations, viz. RedHat, MySQL, SugarCRM and JBoss are all Eclipse Foundation members. Moreover, these organizations realize the importance of not reinventing the wheel. They believe in competing on a common platform and sharing effort wherever possible,” Donald says.