Don Marti

Sun 17 Apr 2005 08:33:50 PM PDT

Commoditize the complement

Textbook "commoditize the complement" from the evil Larry "Papers Please" Ellison on The Star Online:

So I'll mention a few companies here where we think we need to replace their technology. Probably first would be Veritas. Veritas is very expensive, and that's a problem. If people feel they have to use Veritas with Oracle, it dramatically increases the price of using Oracle to the customer — so this isn't me just picking on Veritas.

It's encouraging to see a sustainable motivation for corporate investment in free software. This kind of thing seems like it's good for every business except the intellectual-proprietarian pundit business.