The awkward part is that software has a habit of racing toward free once it becomes good enough. If an open weight model delivers 95 percent of the value without recurring API costs, plenty of companies will choose that and spend the savings on integration instead. History keeps rhyming, even if investors hate the tune.
I don’t know… I was using Open(now Libre)Office over 20 years ago, it wasn’t just good enough, it was better than MS Office at the time, and yet… even though LibreOffice has been free and far more than “good enough” for long over a decade, my corporate decision makers insist that we all use Office365 subscriptions, complete with their service outages and other issues.
Without a doubt. And yet: without open source, pretty much everything digital would come to an end straight away. Sometimes what’s visible isn’t what really matters.
I have definitely seen MS Office and Visual Studio stall at a level and stay there until after they’re clearly surpassed by open source competition, then they fund another round of development and … change, some might say improve, but often it looks like change for the sake of change, especially in Office.
The awkward part is that software has a habit of racing toward free once it becomes good enough. If an open weight model delivers 95 percent of the value without recurring API costs, plenty of companies will choose that and spend the savings on integration instead. History keeps rhyming, even if investors hate the tune.
I don’t know… I was using Open(now Libre)Office over 20 years ago, it wasn’t just good enough, it was better than MS Office at the time, and yet… even though LibreOffice has been free and far more than “good enough” for long over a decade, my corporate decision makers insist that we all use Office365 subscriptions, complete with their service outages and other issues.
Without a doubt. And yet: without open source, pretty much everything digital would come to an end straight away. Sometimes what’s visible isn’t what really matters.
I have definitely seen MS Office and Visual Studio stall at a level and stay there until after they’re clearly surpassed by open source competition, then they fund another round of development and … change, some might say improve, but often it looks like change for the sake of change, especially in Office.