There was this vacuum cleaner salesman who managed to 'gain entry' to our apartment while we were living in Dubai, under the pretext of giving us some gift we had won in a raffle. The adage about vampires also applies to commission driven door-to-door salesmen - you DO NOT invite them into the house! He seemed so passionate about what he claimed to be the greatest vacuum cleaner in the world, which used space age technology and had a few hundred attachments, one of which would even give me a back rub or foot massage!
Now explaining the features of a product is good, but every time I asked him how much it cost, just to find out whether it was within our budget, he kept telling us about another feature or attachment! It was getting to a point where I would have to start being openly rude to him because I knew that there was no way I could afford all the 'free accessories' included and this guy just wasn't going to leave until we had committed to buying the product. Fortunately Navindee was 1+ at the time and when she got hungry nothing stood in her way - including our mafia salesman. He finally told us how much it cost (a little more than what my first car was worth) and we said 'no thanks' - obviously.
Why am I ranting about this now? It's apparently this approach to sales, where people are paid to push crap with no interest in the customer's actual needs or a long term relationship that's screwing up the world economy! The salesman I spoke about spent more than an hour doing his pitch and had I given in, I would have been holding onto an electric fan with a filter and 300 accessories I would never use, feeling like a sucker, while he would have been laughing all the way to the bank!
The typical open source way of doing business is the diametric opposite of this, where there is no sale or money made up front - we only make money if the customer wants a relationship. The customer downloads the product, tries it out and if it suits his or her needs, pays for support and/or services.
Open source products depend on actually providing value because we can't depend on hype and a cool marketing campaign to get the customer to pay us - there is no shrink wrapped box that we can push someone to buy. We're paid only if we deliver a great product that actually meets the customer's needs. Now everyone could figure out a formula that makes it mandatory to think of long term benefits to the customer, I'm sure we could prevent future financial meltdowns!
I've heard the open source movement being labeled as not being capitalist, but I say it is; the person with the best product and services offering will ultimately get paid. It just doesn't reward pressure selling and hype, which screws the customer and ultimately the supplier as well, which I think is capitalism gone mad!
For further reading, Jonathan wrote a post that will give you an idea of how a user of open source software can reward the creator without spending a cent, and this article talks about Open Source SOA offerings out there, including ours.
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