Open Source as Financial Derivatives
Optaros, an open source services company, has an interesting slide deck titled The Paradox of Choice (pdf) with some comparisons bt financial derivatives and open source vs. proprietary software. The text is sparse, so it takes a lot of reading between the lines to get where they’re going, but it’s a very interesting take on the economics of open source.
Some intriguing quotes:
The promise of open source is to eliminate the choice of products and increase the choice of vendors.
…
The search for “one throat to choke” is the manufacture of “vendor lock-in”…the “one throat” you are choking is the “vendor locking you in”.
The slide deck goes on to argue (or so I infer, given that I’m missing the voice-over) that IT managers should diversify their software portfolio, not standardize. This diversification represents the creation of options to switch software at a future date, and according to Black-Scholes, such an option has a concrete value.
I’m not sure I’m sold on the concept, at least not on the basis of this slide deck, but it is certainly food for thought.
Originally posted at The Indifference Curve.