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Interesting Article I found.

It’s finally happened. Open Source had been sued in an antitrust case. At least the judge was able to see sense. The main points being put across was that providing free software was in effect selling software for nothing. The court has decided that commercial vendors are still able to maintain healthy market shares in such cases.

The companies at the centre of this extraordinary case where IBM for it's open source activities, Red Hat and Novell. Red Hat and Novell are both providers of Linux distributions. Novell is also the owner of the Suse brand.

The complaint was brought forward by Daniel Wallace who claims that there had been collaboration between the fore mentioned companies and the free software foundation to fix software prices and by doing so making it difficult for commercial companies to gain or maintain their market share. In many ways this case reminds me of the historical battle between Microsoft and Netscape for market share in the browser wars. The major difference being that neither company was providing open source. The only similarity being that Microsoft was offering a free alternative to an existing commercial application.

In the Microsoft / Netscape battle both companies where supplying a web browser. Netscape was a commercial product and from the start of the battle they where the clear market leader. Microsoft then started offering Microsoft internet explorer for free. This crushed Netscape's lead and lead to a complete reversal with Microsoft becoming the eventual winner. The rest is history and Microsoft has went from strength to strength and is still the no1 browser in terms of usage.

The recent court case claims that open source is potentially harmful for commercial developers. The verdict has thrown out this claim and cited a few examples of open source and commercial applications being able to exist side my side. A few examples that the judge used where Open Office and The Gimp.

The Gimp is a free application for editing images and many would say it is in competition with commercial products such as Photoshop from Adobe. In reality Adobe Photoshop is a very successful product and is a lot more popular that it's free alternative. Open Office is another free product that is in competition with a commercial product. In this case the competitor is Microsoft Office and I don't really think there is any real threat to Microsoft's dominance in the office application sector.

Open source is all about freedom. Not just free software but freedom to do what you like with the software. Open source means users can modify their programs and have more control over then than commercial products, but open source products tend to be more attractive to computer savvy users, whereas the general home users will settle for the more popular commercial products.

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