Apparently Shai Agassi,the president of SAP has made a rather surprising remark during an address to a business conference. He states that Open Source (In particular Linux) is not innovative enough. He adds that
“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society, And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IPâ€
These statements are surprising because I had the opinion that SAP had a rather positive view of Open Source. It has collaborated with Mysql to help mature Mysql’s enterprise offerings.MySQL gets access to SAP database technology . SAP have also invested in Zend, the PHP company SAP & Zend. I also was surprised when SAP showed great interest in the article I wrote for PHP architect on how to Integrate SAP with PHP
I disagree with what he stated. Intellectual property socialism has launched a global innovation which the whole globe is taking advantage of, the Internet. Imagine if Vint cerf had “protected†his IP and licensed the use of TCP/IP. Or you had to pay Tim Berners Lee a license fee every time you wrote your shopping list in HTML. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and all the other enterprise players would not be in the position to commercialy exploit something which was created out of the very thing he is deriding.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2145809/sap-dismisses-open-source?page=2