I have just had a long conversation with a friend at Microsoft about why and if an ISV should bet on Microsoft (MS) or Open source (FOSS). As everyone who has been around for a while knows, this is an age old debate and one on which my views are very clear.

How do ISVs make money?
Well, they make money in both MS and FOSS worlds. They sell packaged software and sell it per license or hosted model. The advantage of FOSS is that whilst you will rarely find a ready to use off the shelf product, the ISV takes that on, plugs the gaps, adds new features, and makes it user friendly. Hence, his time to market is faster and he is able to have a differentiated offering at the same time.

Who do ISVs compete against?
Well in the case of FOSS they compete against other small vendors and big vendors too (for e.g. Oracle) but in the MS world they also compete against MS! MS has recently entered the SME space for ERP and business applications and lots of ISV vendors have wound up. Hence its my contention that if you are a ISV for server side applications then you are better off being on FOSS platform. It helps that MS is not competing with you   On the desktop side, of course, you have no choice but to sleep with the devil.

What about skills/talent?
Well, if you would just look at sheer numbers - MS has got a larger developer community and ready availability of talent. But does that offer an ISV sustainable competitive advantage? I guess not. Its good for system integrators IMHO, whose business is to add bodies.

Net, Net if you are a vendor of server side FOSS and do not have a particular affinity to MS (like the author of the article has for personal, emotional and business (I still own MS stock ) please work with one less competitor. Do yourself a favor - find a good Linux distro and get started.