How Aras Makes Money by Giving Away PLM Software
Summary
Aras major customers include Motorola, Rolls-Royce, Xerox, Freudenberg, Lockheed Martin, Ingersoll Rand, Klockner Desma, Hi-P and ACCO Brands. Aras gets a free ride into the manufacturing IT environment because it is built on the Microsoft stack; there is no proprietary middleware requiring a small army of installation experts. Our shared mental map of the software market can be compared to the model most people have in their heads of what the Creationism approach to biology looks like: a sovereign deity executes a grand plan, populating a world. In the evolutionary analogy, commercial PLM companies might view Aras as a cancer, while users might see it as a domesticated mammal, easily trained to perform many useful tasks. Economist Yochai Benkler calls the social means of production enabled by open source software the greatest achievement of the Internet.
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