The Business Prospects for Open Source: What's Needed?
by Sam Dean - Jun. 06, 2008Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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I've just been reading through a report from Olliance Group (a consulting firm for open source companies), and it contains some good material about companies and projects focused on open source. The report is a summary of the 2008 Open Source Think Tank from February, where 120 leading pundits came together. Quite a bit of the report contains familiar rah-rah material about Yahoo buying Zimbra and Sun buying MySQL, but the most interesting thoughts are about how open source software vendors can benefit from imitating some of the practices of mature software companies. Here's why some of this makes sense.
The Olliance Group report concludes that "the open source industry has matured to a point where vendors need to behave like traditional commercial software vendors." Now, I can see some open source purists rolling their eyes at this. After all, differentiation from the norm is one of the things many people like about open source software. Get your karma off my dogma, man.
However, the report drills down to some specific areas where open source software providers can improve by imitating the practices of mature, proprietary vendors. In particular it calls for addressing the whole product lifecycle, including "support, maintenance, upgrades, integration and certification with third party technologies." Let's look at these one-by-one:
Support: Sure, Red Hat makes a mint by charging for support and is renowned for good support, but most open source projects fall down badly in this area. It's too bad, too, because good support can be generated by crowd-sourcing (the community provides documentation and answers), through community wikis, and in many other ways.
Maintenance: Here I actually agree and disagree with the report. In the background of most good open source projects, there are many eyeballs focused on maintenance issues. The crowd is powerful, though not always.
Upgrades: Consider how frequently Apple upgrades its operating system, which many people consider to be a huge software achievement (it has open source roots). How many times in the last six years? Five, six? Something like that--and that's a whole operating system. Open source project leaders should focus on regular upgrades.
Integration and certification with third party technologies: This is hugely needed for many projects, and one of the reasons why I wish the Linux community would coordinate efforts better. The community does a good team-oriented effort of updating the kernel, but drivers and other compatibility components are a mess. The latest post from The Linux Driver Project went up in October of 2007. It begins "sorry for the very long delay in getting this project back up off the ground."
Beyond these points made by the Olliance Group, I strongly believe in what Microsoft's Sam Ramji said in our interview with him about open source--that "missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness." Put simply, it should be easier and more prevalent for open sourcers to be financially rewarded for their work.
And finally, I've written before about Chris Peters, who was the doggedly hard-working person who essentially built Microsoft Excel, and Guy Kawasaki, who was a legendary evangelist for Apple's products. Although they were purveyors of the proprietary, I observed how closely they listened to businesses about their needs, and how much they reached out to businesses as evangelists. For many open source projects, these are sorely needed skills as well.
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