Re: Future of Software and Its Impact on Free/Open Source

>  I can't think of that many open source web apps.

Well, Freshmeat returns 89 results for "webmail". In contrast there
are only a handful of major proprietary webmail providers. The
difference is one of userbase, but the same thing affects client side
software.

I suspect a lot of the more popular webapps are proprietary because if
you are really keen on your own software, you need to run it, and good
webapps have a nasty habit of becoming more expensive the more users
you have. Open source is usually not rich, so it's a bad fit for apps
that are expensive to maintain.  The other problem is that webapps
which scale tend to have a completely different architecture to ones
which don't, but most open source coders write software to run on
their desktop apache and not, say, 2000 machines. Probably related to
the previous problem.

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