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Matt Asay from FOSS firm Alfresco writes on the prediction by Gartner, a noted market research firm, that 80% of commercial software will include elements of open source technology. We're talking about Microsoft Windows...Oracle databases...SAP's ERP suite... Many of these companies already embed open source in their products but don't like to admit it or make noise about it. Market pressures will force them to stop pretending to be the source of all innovation and to "outsource" ever-growing amounts of their R&D resources to mining the best open source has to offer.
I can speak from experience that building on open-source technologies truly does lower the cost of development. Alfresco--the company I work for--went from zero lines of code to a product that had several Fortune 500 customers in just six months. We were able to leverage the strength of open-source projects like Spring, Lucene, and OpenOffice.
This is what the future looks like: heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation. I agree with Asay that open source is already embedded in many proprietary products, and that traditional firms benefit from the wide availability of open source technologies. I also agree with Asay that firms should leverage open source as low-cost inputs for incremental product development in areas that will provide them with no competitive advantage. Firms that can, in Asay's words, push the envelop in innovation, should by focusing more on pioneering aspects of commercialization than re-inventing the wheel.
However, I disagree with an implicit message in Asay's post of the significance in ~80% of commercial software embedding open source. The fact that open source supporters benchmark the progress of open source with integration into proprietary products reveals the movement once again grasping for any kind of re-enforcement. Open source is not a new phenomenon yet supporters are inclined to tout open source potential while looking past its actual state and what holds it back. Thats why open source supporters are not asking why it is not integrated into 100% of commercial products, why its strength is in the incremental aspects of product development rather than groundbreaking R&D and why open source movement slogans suggest open source market dominence while actual market impact is weak.
posted by Noel Le @ 1:44 PM | Free Culture Movement
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