What impresses me the most about open source is the change in relationship between the software developer and the end users. Without a sales-person in the middle, this is a healthier relationship built on collaboration, not on cash extraction. End-users continue to pay for the things they value, and developers provide just the features that create value. With the well publicized advantages of this model, there has been a growing problem with the existing enterprise software business models. Customers are increasingly reluctant to pay upfront for business application software that has not been deployed and has not produced any value.
The existing open source community is well covered by blog and print media, but what we need to be watching is the very large demographic of business IT professionals and end-users who are currently neither participating in nor benefiting from the open source model… and these are primarily Microsoft customers and partners. Microsoft business computing infrastructure [Office, Windows Server, IIS and SqlServer] is the standard in thousands of businesses from midsized companies to the largest corporate enterprises. Companies have made a huge investment in and commitment to Microsoft-based infrastructure and skill sets. This represents a very large community of end users and business software professionals that have been left out of open source to date. The business computing community’s more conservative needs and interests, however, are different from the early adopters of open source, but the value of open source to them is still very compelling. As they join and expand the community, the characteristics of open source will certainly change.
I believe that we are on the leading edge of a second wave of open source that includes new offerings, different practices, and a rapid expansion of the open source community. The business IT professionals and end users joining the community do not want to participate in Operating System, Database, and Middleware layer technology programming projects. They are however ready, willing, and able to collaborate at the business application level.
The second wave of open source will be about business applications as companies supplement and replace the applications they currently run from vendors such as Oracle, SAP, Infor, PTC, Dassault, and UGS.
The second wave of open source will remove the requirement to contribute modified source code. At the business application level, developers will be modeling both common best practices and proprietary, competitive business process models, data structures and business rules. Contributions will be optional and some members of the community will act purely as a consumers.
I believe the second wave will expand the community to include the participation of the Microsoft customers and partners, and with Microsoft’s cooperation, will create a compelling value proposition for all. From my perspective, the second wave has already started to swell and we intend to help build it. I’d like to hear. What do you think the future of open source will bring?