« What's Open Source Got to Do With Selling Software | Main | Like Jerry McGuire, Follow the Money, Not the OSS Stats in the News »

As Savio Rodgrigues points out over at Infoworld, traditional software--or at least traditional middleware--is not being replaced by open source software (OSS). Turning his points around, if you are basing IT infrastructure or any other type of business decisions on the demise of closed software, do not bet the farm on it. Where the IT world--both end users and the channel--is really going is to open choice. (Simulataneously and the subject of other posts, the users are increasigly saying we don't care what's under the covers as long as no one comes along and sues us for using it.)

What's going on is a melding of business/development models where whether software was developed inhouse in the traditional product-marketing-driven fashion used by some IT suppliers, the engineering-driven fashion used by others, or by a community in the OSS fashion does not matter. Savio uses IBM as an example and admits his bias as an IBM employee who worked marketing the IBM Websphere Application Server Community Edition offering, formerly Gluecode. and formerly and still a key driver of Apache Geronimo. But he's on the right point even where his proof points require inside baseball knowledge of IBM's, Oracle's, BEA's, etc.'s business practices and detailed results.

A series of financial-market announcements this week by SAP, IBM, and others (with Microsoft likely to follow suit Thursday afternoon 7/19) show that a rising tide is raising all boats. Some of these suppliers are very dedicated to OSS; some pay it lip service, others find the model a yoke around their plans. But everyone is in the game; there is no "we vs. they."

Most important that tide will turn in 3-12 months so enjoy it while you can from an investor point of view. From an IT point of view:

-- If you are an ISV. OEM or service provider, build the product functionality and services structure you believe your potential customers need, not functionality only OSS can deliver. Do not base your business plan on OSS metaphysics. But use OSS to reduce development expense and time to market (two really great characteristics of cutting out the product marketing folks and engineering management). For example, use Websphere AS Community Edition during development and then make your product interoperable with the tens of thousands of classic WebSphere AS sites out there (maybe it's just one ten of thousands but it's still a lot of sites).
-- If you're an IT user that will continue to develop traditionally (as opposed to moving to SaaS and component development), use OSS tools and apps that improve your enterprise's competitiveness (and give back to the community from which you take).
-- If you are part of the increasing percentage of end users going SaaS, enjoy the summer and pay your monthly fee on time to avoid the late charge. None of this matters to you.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2144

Posted by: Savio Rodrigues at July 19, 2007 01:57 PM | Permalink