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New Year's week is always a good time to step back and reassess work objectives. (And your weight, addictions, prelidictions etc. if you so choose. I am sticking just to re-assessing my work.)

About half of my research relates to open source software (OSS). Most of the rest of my research involves investment-related research concerning the 10 largest software suppliers (see link to Research 2.0 to the right). Increasingly over this decade, those two subjects have converged.

While all the other year-end look backs and lookaheads scattered across the Internet are still taking a backward looking approach by talking about the "war between the OSS world and the commercial world," that is no longer a viable analogy. The closed vs. open war ended in 2007 (if not earlier) because in my opinion,
-- IBM tied or surpassed Red Hat in OSS-related revenue in 2007 (even as Red Hat grew 30%).
-- Microsoft decided all the hoopla over its OSS statements (e.g., "Linux is cancer") was a distraction and is now moving ahead aggressively with Samba, with its OSI-based licenses, and on many other OSS fronts (there is no one more religious than a convert).
-- Whereas in 2006, Oracle saw OSS as just a way to stick a finger in Red Hat's eye, in 2007, Oracle saw OSS for the tactical advantages and reduced R&D expense it provides (Oracle rolled out a virtualization product in weeks based on OSS)
-- Google built its infrastructure on OSS over 10 years; Google held Developers Days in June 2007 to get as much intellectual property going for its first generation applications products as possible with minimal cost to its investors
-- SAP is trailing in OSS related tactics but has made its database software OSS and will probably use OSS more aggressively as it brings NetWeaver out of its installed base.

Those five factoids pretty much make the convergence complete in my mind. They also raise questions about how to redirect my research framework and my biases in reaction. (NOTE: summaries of my OSS research show up on ebizQ.net, my broader IT investment research shows up on Research 2.0, and most of my opinionating begins at one of the two sites and then show up a lot of other places by means I only sort of understand).

First, here are the sources of my biases: I have been an information-technology (IT) market and product research analyst for a long time. Bull SA, Data General, the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill, and IDC before my current spot. I have consistently researched and analyzed the same topic at all of those places—What’s hot in IT now? What’s not and why?

Translate that list of companies above into market and product research topics and I’ve covered a good bit of the history of the IT industry: custom-built inventory control in the warehouse and accounting on the desktop 40 years ago; Multics, PARS, virtual memory management, minicomputing, microcomputing, and the Soul of a New Machine (the market for the machine not the book) during the 70s; material requirements planning (MRP), the first integrated office automation software and the industry’s first laptop in the 80s; the open-software movement, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the debut of R/3 in the U.S., shared-memory high performance computing (not shared processor), and more in the 90s; application service provision, business process management (BPM), the enterprise service bus (ESB), and OSS so far this decade.

Because I have been talking about the convergence of OSS and all these other items for about five years, I see no reason to change my biases. I will continue to try to balance the opinion among
• culture subjects such as the acceptance of the GPL license or the Microsoft "live" philosophy
• development subjects such as Eclipse, the Linux Foundation, the efforts at TechED and Carnegie-Mellon
• Business subjects such as what IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP, Sun, CA and others—including Microsoft—are doing no matter what terms and conditions or development models they are using. I just need to add Alfresco, Compiere, MySQL, OpenBravo, Pentaho, Sugar, Talend and a few others to that list (I have already added Red Hat)

The research framework will change to include higher-order software beginning with ERP and CRM applications as well as all the emerging services that OSS will enable (people used to call them components). Because ebizQ readers are mostly users, I will look at things from your point of view here. Investors should look more at Research 2.0 but there will be many cross overs between the two I am sure.

But I am no longer an agnostic about the "religious" aspects of the OSS movement (I was never using that term quite right anyways). Software is not air or a tree or a fish. I have to stop pretending I am willing to be convinced otherwise.

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

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