Unfortunately, the industry we provide a service to is mired in local authority politics, so I can't disclose here. I'd like to be able to say "fuck, that is ridiculous" without someone picking up on it someday and killing my business as a result. We're proud of the product but the industry itself is very cutthroat with only a few players. It was hard enough to carve out the market we have. So, this is my personal account. That being said, it's a great market for some of the same reasons. Our current contracts are 8-10 years (but it takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get them.)
Having said all that, I still disagree with your Solaris vs. open source argument in principal. You don't have to have a huge amount of customers to be doing well to me. If 95% of the people are using an open source product but you still have 5% clinging to you because they love it and you're profitable...is it really so terrible?
Of course, if you build a business, you want to be mutable anyway. You can't just sit around hoping product X will feed you and your employees without some sort of proactive business development. As part of that, you always have to be prepared for someone smarter and more agile. You play to your strengths. If you have market share, you leverage it. If you have agility, you leverage that instead.
Edit - One of the things that doesn't get discussed around here often enough, is the ability to form and execute as proper business. Your product is not (or more accurately perhaps, should not necessarily be) the entire definition of your business. Any business that expects to be around in the future must generate income. Competition is always going to be there in one form or another. If that competition happens to be people who like to work for free making open source products, it could be a mountain to climb to compete directly. The business may have to adapt in other ways.
I'll give an example of that. Everyone in our industry used to provide an embedded software component that required an OS that had a license associated with it. One of our competitors pitched an idea to build the same software using Linux. It very likely could have crippled us had they managed to deliver something at a much lower cost. So, we went through negotiations and tried to acquire them. Those negotiations failed but we realized that they really weren't close to that open source solution at all. We jumped at the chance to develop our own open source product and it is now in pilot locations. Nobody else in the industry has even blinked and we can suddenly cut some really outrageous costs out of our equation.
So, the beauty of open source, is that it's open to everyone.
I know it's currently in-fashion to give everything away for free but I personally think most reasonable people (that is to say, the ones you actually want on your site) don't mind paying for something of value.
Create a product. Charge a fair amount. Provide outstanding value.
It has worked for us. I'm no billionaire but I'm doing a hell of a lot better than 99% of the other 35 year-olds around me doing something I love and providing a product I can stand behind.
Back in the day, PHP was exciting. It was free, it was powerful, it was easy to learn. Everyone coming out of college knew C anyway and it has a similar structure. You could suddenly give your circa 1999 web pages a page date in REAL TIME and you could respond to forms without nasty cgi-bin. Eureka!
Nobody gets excited about it anymore because it solved the problem it was aiming to solve a long, long time ago.
FWIW they provide an almost completely functional Visual Studio Express edition for free (that is a relatively new thing) and have even started including things like JQuery. It's a pretty slow process but I think they have always listened to their devs.
Incidentally, I do think it's the best IDE out there but I'm not a MS fanboi, and have spent plenty of time in other IDEs and even vi :-)
Just took a look at EarthBrowser. Very cool indeed. I didn't expect Adobe AIR and would prefer it didn't default to a desktop icon but overall I like it quite a lot. Can I remove the drop shadow from the default font?
An unexpected side effect is that I can finally tell what time it is in England (for football / soccer matches. Go Arsenal!)
Edit - registered my copy. Really enjoying it!
Edit 2 - The included version 1.0 of Adobe Air raised an alert ("very dangerous") in Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009. I went ahead and upgraded to version 1.5.1 of Air, as was suggested by Kaspersky.
Apart from the clunky interface (wait, was this intended to be used only with Facebook?) ... That was the first thing I noticed, too. You can click the 'more information' button and get a bit, eh, more info.
Not a bad idea but the execution is a little lacking. Not too far off.
I think the only people who don't value experience are those without it.
Skill is almost always a result of experience. Yes, there are those who "just get it" and can code circles around others but without the experience, they are having to reinvent something (perhaps albeit elegantly) that people with experience already know.
Case: Write me a bubble sort. You probably learned this in college and having gained that experience, it's probably easy now. A 16 year old gifted coder first has to consider the process while you are already writing it.
I'm sure this was intended as a joke but it was an actual issue for me, since I sometimes can't read an entire article without looking suspiciously inactive at work. :-)
Having said that, I saved some money and took two years off to pursue all of my life-interests (mine, in fact, are quite similar to yours) but when it came down to it, I surfed the web, played games, did a small amount of programming and just doddled around all day for the majority of my time off. Then I went back to work.
To me it comes down to one thing: purpose. If you have no specific purpose, you just get caught-up in day-to-day living. The main thing I learned in my two years off is that I can accomplish 99% of what I want to do with my life whether I have a job or not.
Having said all that, I still disagree with your Solaris vs. open source argument in principal. You don't have to have a huge amount of customers to be doing well to me. If 95% of the people are using an open source product but you still have 5% clinging to you because they love it and you're profitable...is it really so terrible?
Of course, if you build a business, you want to be mutable anyway. You can't just sit around hoping product X will feed you and your employees without some sort of proactive business development. As part of that, you always have to be prepared for someone smarter and more agile. You play to your strengths. If you have market share, you leverage it. If you have agility, you leverage that instead.
Edit - One of the things that doesn't get discussed around here often enough, is the ability to form and execute as proper business. Your product is not (or more accurately perhaps, should not necessarily be) the entire definition of your business. Any business that expects to be around in the future must generate income. Competition is always going to be there in one form or another. If that competition happens to be people who like to work for free making open source products, it could be a mountain to climb to compete directly. The business may have to adapt in other ways.
I'll give an example of that. Everyone in our industry used to provide an embedded software component that required an OS that had a license associated with it. One of our competitors pitched an idea to build the same software using Linux. It very likely could have crippled us had they managed to deliver something at a much lower cost. So, we went through negotiations and tried to acquire them. Those negotiations failed but we realized that they really weren't close to that open source solution at all. We jumped at the chance to develop our own open source product and it is now in pilot locations. Nobody else in the industry has even blinked and we can suddenly cut some really outrageous costs out of our equation.
So, the beauty of open source, is that it's open to everyone.