I used to be rather positive about open source software (or free software, let’s assume in this very post there’s no difference) overall, for at least 4 reasons listed in this post. But after thinking about it, I now believe open source software constraints entrepreneurship in a very unfruitful way. I came upon these conclusions, as with a bunch of classmates whom with I’ve been building an open source project, whilst trying to empathize asking myself “if I were a competing software vendor, would I fear those guys?” The answer is obviously “yes”.

Actually, software new entrants main competitors probably aren’t well-identified independent software vendors but unsuspected and most often free-of-charge open source software as well.

Say for instance you want to start a company to compete with Adobe on creating and saving .pdf files, how do you think you’ll manage to compete against software (like the one I use, CutePDF, an excellent piece of software although slower than Acrobat) that are free of charge?? If you decide to go after market leader Adobe, then you probably have a sort of more agile development team than Adobe, no pain-in-the-ass installed base to take care of (so far), a business model is just clever and you’ve been generous enough on stock options to attract the best country sales managers on Earth. So it’s likely that Adobe (very clever guys over there) will take you seriously.

But chances are high as well that you’re not going to start up your company at all, even though you believe you do better than Adobe in a number of areas. But since it’s obvious the new venture will never align prices amounting to zero, how can one compete with (often good) products that are free of charge?

Hence my call: open source software constraint entrepreneurship in the software industry and threaten the very idea of free-market competition. Indeed, with no new entrant jumping on the ring, established software companies (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Google, Adobe, IBM, etc.) will tend over time to be sort of challenged less, or by open source or free software projects only. This mechanism doesn’t help free-market competition (less market players), doesn’t drive commercial innovation and hence affects the end-user experience and consequently the computer industry as a whole.