Walmart and Free Software
Walmart is know for it's "every day low prices." Through ruthless supply chain management and aggressive negotiation with its suppliers (suppliers are supposed to reduce their prices by 10% annually to Walmart). Naturally WalMart has quickly adapted to outsourcing taking advantage of the cheaper labor markets for manufactured goods in China and Indonesia. In fact WalMart's suppliers almost have to go overseas because of the aggressive annual price cuts that WalMart demands. This means that WalMart through shear size is able to drive down prices on retail goods until they are completely commoditized.
What's WalMart have to do with free software? Well they share several things. The free software ecosystem has always taken advantage of the global labor market. Since free software is indeed free in price, it allows someone to simply download and use the software. This means for years now open source software has taken advantage of the Internet and Internet development best practices (mail lists, wikis, distributed version control systems, distributed program management).
Furthermore since free software is free as in price and free as in source it has the effect of commoditizing software. For proprietary software companies this is extremely corrosive on those incredibly high margins. What's interesting is that free software is slowly climbing up the corporate software food chain, taking things that previously had value and reducing them to a commodity and then eventually to a free item.
Let's take TCI/P stacks. Once upon a time this was something that you actually paid money for. Eventually it was incorporated in the Windows operating system (please note that MS used the BSD stack - they didn't actually write their own). Now every os is expected to have one without too much effort.
Recent moves by Oracle indicates that they understand that MySQL is beginning to move into the lower end of their market. So they purchased InnoDB which provided MySQL with a transaction engine. They are still attempting to purchase JBOSS - although it sounds like from my sources that the JBOSS guys want FAR too much for their company (although since they are profitable - it's probably a good negotiating position to stake out).
Since Free Software is a global group of developers, it means that even if free software development is stopped in the United States, it will continue in the global software marketplace. In the end this is a good thing for consumers of software as free software represents a great competitor to the older way of doing things. Commoditization is a good thing. After all does a Office Suite really need to cost $499? The answer Constant Reader is no.
Sorry for the delays when posting early this month. I was doing some landscaping when I dropped a 150 pound rock on my hands which made typing nearly impossible.
