What does the future hold for open source?

By Alex Handy

April 1, 2008 — Open source is a business model. It’s also a development model. To some, it’s even a marketing model. But what will open source become? At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco in late March, some of the most open minds in technology looked into the future with this question in mind.

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO and founder of Canonical, predicted that the future of open source was becoming brighter all the time. “It’s interesting to me that we’re still asking the question, ‘What’s the driver for doing open source?’ There is always a de facto standard way of doing things: It was IBM, then it was Microsoft. Now, I think we’re at a tipping point where people will say, ‘What is the reason I have to do proprietary software?’”

Shuttleworth’s company produced Ubuntu , so he’s got a vested interest in a better future for the platform. But not everyone agrees with his rosy view.

Venture capitalist Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture, expressed a desire to believe that the tipping point for open-source dominance is at hand. But he tempered that hope with the brutish reality of the business world. Specifically, Skok said that the Sillicon Valley is a very different place from the rest of the world. “Every time I get out of the Valley, I realize that we’re a long way from changing the real world.” Skok said that most enterprises and businesses are still heavily dependent on closed-source solutions.

Service Is Not Enough
Despite predicting growth in open source, Shuttleworth said that he didn’t expect current business models to hold out for open-source entrepreneurs. “I’m not convinced that service and support itself is a sufficient proposition to create value. Open-source companies are going to have to go beyond supporting the code they provide. I think the companies that are going to create the most value will deliver open-source based services of value,” said Shuttleworth.

“I see real challenges for Oracle, Sun, SAP and IBM in shifting from what they currently do to actually providing data-driven transactional services,” he added.

Those traditional IT companies could still be seeing a boost in their open-source businesses, however, as the economies in America and elsewhere teeter on the brink of recession.

Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres, said that he’s seen many firms trimming their IT staffs by five to 10 percent, recently. That’s good news for open-source solutions, he said, which are cheaper to bring online and require less infrastructure and code to make deployment ready.

Shuttleworth, too, sees the economic downturn as a good thing for open source. “I think the absence of money is a bigger spur to innovation than the presence of money. Throughout history, where you see innovation is when people are squeezed,” said Shuttleworth. “I do expect a belt tightening time to be good for innovation.”

Related Search Term(s): Open source

Share this link: https://sptechweb.com/link/31910

Open Source: Oratopigiphobia: Fear of Visible Source Open-source software is free, and from reputable producers, is efficient and well-supported. So why are many still reluctant to use it?

Open Text to Acquire Burntsand The deal reportedly cost CA$11 million, and Burntsand will bring its SharePoint Solution Integration to Open Text

Open Source: Irreconcilable Differences Why should there be an emphasis on making open-source operating systems compatible with commercial ones? If open-source developers are not careful, they will encourage their customers to seek proprietary offerings instead.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

What does the future hold for open source?

By Alex Handy

Related Articles

Add comment