An article on why user-companies' futures depend on open source software closes with the thought:

Get ready for a future in which you'll get far less personal attention from the vendor and in which you'll have to take on more responsibility for decisions or, at least, expect to pay for advice to help you make decisions.

In other words, the software industry of the future will look a lot like the open source industry of today. Cheap (or free) software, but more responsibility for the user. Which is the second reason your future depends on open source. Your organization will increasingly need to do more research, make more vendor-independent decisions, and implement more community-shared systems. You need to start sharpening your open source skills if you want your organization ready for the software industry of the future.

It isn't going to happen, barring some loony government favoritism of open source, for reasons quoted here last week. Namely, a model of selling services is a perfectly honorable business plan, but many customers would rather buy turn-key software packages that don't require services, and the open source threat to make such a choice unavailable is surreal.

In any event, the beneficiaries would not be the open source companies -- users would be much more likely to turn to the alternative turn-key service of grid computing, discussed by Nicholas Carr, and, in the business world, being promoted by Jonathan Schwartz of Sun.

I keep getting this image of Jonathan Schwartz shovelling money into the open source movement while laughing maniacally, because he expects his grid computing to be the inheritor of a proprietary-FOSS desktop/local server war that leaves no survivors.

posted by James DeLong @ 11:20 AM | Software

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