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Building a $36.5 million business with open source software (ibm.com)
39 points by paltman on Aug 23, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


This article is just plain awful:

"- Avoid the General Product License (GPL)." in the introduction sets the tone. It's an article about Open Source Software and you don't even know the name of one of the biggest licenses?

"Coming from backgrounds primarily in enterprise software, which meant Microsoft® .NET and C#, as well as Oracle and Java™ technology, it was obvious that we needed to choose something different. No one wanted to spend money on licensing and managing compliance to licensing."

Java has a _huge_ OSS ecosystem and the JVM is free as in beer. The idea that their technical choice came down to "Python or Ruby" seems to me like they'd already decided to go with one and then had to rationalise.

I stopped reading after that.


I didn't know Developerworks still existed. After this article, I wish it didn't.


I don't know the history of developerWorks, but there are articles on the web site detailing Linux kernel internals that I've found useful, so I hope it doesn't go away.


Wait - is this special? Don't hundreds of companies do this?


Judging by their track record, the fact that AOL paid $36.5M for a company doesn't mean the company was worth that...


> Approach the community with an attitude of contributing back.

Refreshing.




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