Open source economics
17th June 2002
Food for thought: Joel Spolsky on the economics of Open Source software. Joel starts by explaining the economic concept of complements—products that complement your product so that if their price goes down, demand for your product increases. He then goes on to demonstrate how this concept explains the decision of several large companies (including IBM, Sun and HP) to financially support open source software. As is usual for Joel on Software the article makes fascinating reading.
More recent articles
- Large Language Models can run tools in your terminal with LLM 0.26 - 27th May 2025
- Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt - 25th May 2025
- Live blog: Claude 4 launch at Code with Claude - 22nd May 2025