Oh golly, gee whizz, I guess we should just close our doors and shut down then. Peter Levine thinks you can't make money as an Open Source company... well, that sums it all up.<p>Wait a minute.<p>Fuck that.<p>I know Peter Levine is smart and well-respected and all that, but this is so much bullshit. For starters, all he really said, for using all those words, is "it's hard to build a business to the size of Oracle or Amazon or Microsoft, around a core of Open Source".<p>No. Fucking. Shit.<p>Really?<p>It's hard to build a business like Microsoft, Amazon or Oracle??? You're kidding me, right? I mean, it's <i>not</i> like any of those companies are atypical outliers in any way, right?<p>So, if we just take all our source, close it, and move to a proprietary business model, then we should have no problem building "the next Microsoft" right?<p>Also, am I wrong in thinking that Amazon is hardly even in the same business as Red Hat? What are they even doing in this comparison?<p>I dunno, color me biased (I am) but isn't Peter <i>really</i> just arguing that an "open source" company isn't going to generate the returns necessary, in the required timeframe, to justify investment by Andreesen-Horowitz? Because honestly, that's all I'm hearing. Nobody says you have to become "the next Microsoft" to be successful... well, nobody except Peter Levine, I guess.<p>Meanwhile, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Red Hat, Cloudera, BonitaSoft, JasperSoft, Pentaho and a whole laundry list of companies are making money "selling open source". Are any of them going to IPO? I don't know, but from where I'm sitting, that isn't the point.<p>All of that said, where I wholeheartedly agree with Peter, is the bit about adding a SaaS element with the underlying technology as a platform. At Fogbeam, I expect we'll have a traditional "support subscription" (ala Red Hat) model going for a long-time to come, but we are definitely starting to move in the direction of building purpose-specific / vertical aligned solution on top of our base stack, and delivering those as SaaS offerings. Personally, I see those as complementary strategies, and not mutually exclusive.