When the ancient Greeks went out to wage war against the hordes of who ever it was turn to slaughter, they made a point of burning the boats they came in the minute all the soldiers were on shore.

They didn’t do it because the boats were not valuable any more. In fact, when landing on enemy shore boats become more valuable, not less. But the value of these boats where in their ability to carry you back home, even if you didn’t manage to slit the throats of all those other people.

That value proved to a bit too distracting. Better burn the boats and make sure all the men understand that there really isn’t any way to turn back, unless it’s on the broken backs of the enemy soldiers.

Releasing your commercially developed software, the one you spent the last two years designing, writing and debugging and you really really hope to be able to generate revenue from again, as Open Source software, works in almost the same way.

We destroy the value of the bits and bytes, the precious intellectual property so dear to companies of old, venture capitalists and lawyers. We make a big mound of it and torch it all up.

Because the value in the software itself proves to be too distracting. When you’re proprietary you can kid yourselves that all you have to do is be better then the competitors in your niche. You can lull yourself to believe that the customers will buy because they don’t have a choice. You drink the KoolAid.

But the IT industry have grown up. It doesn’t work this way any more. If you want to succeed, you need to understand that bits and bytes don’t matter any more. Only customer satisfaction does. Competition does not matter any more. Knocking your customer socks off their feet with amazing service does. And you have to do it again and again and again.

When you know that you have to build your business so that your customers will pay even though you are giving the bits and bytes for free, when your worst competition comes not from some other company down the road but your own creativity and genius and sweat and blood and tears, when you are faced with all that - you realize you have no other choice: excellence is the only option and so succeed you will or die trying.

Open Source does that. I’m not the first to realize it, I know. Matt Assay from Alfresco said it before me. That is how and why RedHat wins CIO Vendor Value awards two years in a row, way ahead much bigger and stronger companies.

But you know what? it’s something else entirely when you can smell those burning ships and hear the locals shouting.

Burn, baby burn. We launch in two days.

Gby.

Burning ship picture courtesy of chatigirl, the Creative Commons and flickr.