December 30, 2008 7:07 AM PST
Open source in 2008: Everything but interest up
While 2008 has been a bleak year for the financial markets and the global economy, it has been very kind to open source, at least based on market share. A review of Net Applications data suggests that there has never been a better time for open source; however, as Google Trends data suggests, it's no longer enough to rest on one's open-source laurels.
- Number of projects. In terms of sheer numbers of open-source projects, as well as traffic to those projects, open source was on a tear in 2008, with SourceForge alone increasing its hosted projects by 10 percent.
- Browsers. Firefox has cracked 20 percent of the market, while Google Chrome has topped 1 percent. Internet Explorer has dropped month over month for nearly 12 straight months in 2008. As IE falls toward 50 percent market share we will, as Glyn Moody suggests, get a taste of real browser competition again.
- Operating systems. Windows, too, has been on a slide, though at 89 percent of the market, it's hardly in a weak position right now. Linux and Mac have both gained at its expense, with the latter taking a real bite (over 1 percent) out of the Redmond giant. But for Mac and Linux, the real market to watch isn't the desktop, but rather the mobile (or nearly mobile) market, where Mac and Linux have real consumer advantages.
- Commercialization. 2008 saw Red Hat and Novell Linux (and JBoss, in the case of Red Hat) revenue jump dramatically, as Sun also saw Open Storage and MySQL revenue climb significantly. But the real story may be in private data. My own company doubled its sales (again), while I know from conversations with executives at SugarCRM, MindTouch, JasperSoft, and other open-source vendors that their sales were on a tear, too. Separately, we're still talking about relatively small amounts of money (under $50 million), but collectively...? Commercial open source is coming into its own.
- General interest. Intriguingly, "open source" as a search term has been on the decline for years, as shown below, but I think this is a positive development. In light of the above, I read this decline to suggest that people are less interested in generic open source and more demanding of specific open-source projects. Does Hadoop meet my needs, in other words, not is it open source? This is a sign of maturity, not weakness. It's a sign of open source going mainstream, as Sun's Zack Urlocker suggests.
"Open Source" search on the decline
(Credit: Google Trends)It has been a banner year for open source, just as it has been since at least 2000. I suspect that 2009 will be much the same...only better.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
So while I cheer for Open Source projects being more viable and used , please stop praising Macs within your articles. It just reveals that you are a hypocrite.
Thanks for reinforcing the idea that all Java developers are nuts.
You know, sometimes we can get open sources of software on internet but if you really get something legal you should get the paid tool such as some dvd ripper software and so on.
http://www.convert-video-dvd.com/dvd-ripper.html#115
I use open source because it works, but there are places, like the desktop, where I think open source as an operating system is inferior to, for example, the Mac. So I use the Mac. It's not being hypocritical. It's called pragmatism.
It does however reveal that you do have a strong anti-MS bias. You're capable of seeing "Just Works" quality in Macs but not in MS software. Any time you refer to proprietary software in a derogatory sense you reference MS - any time you do so in a positive sense you reference Macs.
This is the only reason I dislike your articles -- you just don't seem to be able to stay away from issues that you're not capable of being objective about.
Close/Semi-Open Sourced software have similar issues, but the revenue model is more proven. In the long term this down turn will be good for Open-Source to prove its sustaining value to the economy and the consumer/business world.
By the way, thanks for the reality check when discussing Microsoft's market share loss. CNET posts usually come across as "Microsoft is dying" when discussing a 89% market share. Until Apple hits 20% it will still be a niche company, same with Linux. Competition is a great thing, I wish Linux well... Apple is just oppressive and in the long term will not survive as a OS competitor.
Don't tell RedHat that... they and Novell have been making very decent profits in spite of the economy.
Sure, consultants are going to be hating life, but consultants usually do get hurt, especially when they center their strategies around a buzzword instead of on solid principles.
Also, I would, as an IT decision-maker, be far more willing to partner with an open-source product that I know I can always maintain and modify in-house, than buy into a closed-source vendor whose business may collapse, leaving the product to become orphanware (and due to copyright law, I would be unable to do anything about it).
/P
The one item that seems to be missing from your list is profitability (of the Open Source Software company). I am not sure that the profits are up or ever will be if they are truly open source companies, as we have now seen that companies need to provide something more than just service. In areas where Open Source Software companies have emulated traditional software companies with innovative and proprietary components that cannot be developed by a community, profit is likely up though. Otherwise, as usual, it was a very informative post.
I don't think support is the best model for open source, but I also don't see many companies embracing it wholeheartedly. Most, like Red Hat, have a hybrid support model. These models can be very, very profitable.
OTOH, there are numbers to back up the fact that Open Source actually does quite well in a down economy. All you need to is look at RedHat or Novell's recent income statements (they came out earlier this month, I believe).
If you want to do Open Source and make money at it, you not only need to provide product(s) that are worth having, but more importantly, you need to provide services that are worth having.
It is very difficult to prove a negative, so when these are mostly private companies and we do not hear them trumpeting about how profitable they are, we can assume that they are not profitable. MySQL is a good example. They were never profitable as a private company and this has now come out in various statements from their executives, yet there was a myth out there that they were somehow tremendously profitable.
I do agree with you that some traditional OSS companies that are now agressively obtaining patents such as Red Hat are the profitable ones. The IT manager who believes that having access to open code is a long term protection will get left in the dust as proprietary, closed, patented innovations from the likes of Red Hat start to be felt. However, in very low-level commodity applications where innovation is unlikely to ever occur again, betting on a more pure open source application provider is probably a good bet.
Fini.
You are the very poster who has been chanting the mantra that MySQL was profitable every single year. I finally got you to admit that this was false. What do you not like now?
If you can show me how a company with an explicitly stated policy of reinvesting all income with a revenue increase from $2.5Million to $50Million in four years could not have made a profit if they wanted to then get back to me.
Sheesh, I don't even like MySQL, their policy on contrbutions and copyright reassignment gets right up my nose, but your argument is just dumb.
The dot com companies of the original internet stock bubble era in the late 1990's had huge revenues and growth, but no profit. These dot com companies like Yahoo never had a sustainable profit model and we are still to this day seeing that they are in trouble. Eventually, that bubble burst apart and stock prices went south very fast. Anybody can receive revenues and very large user growth by offering their software for a very small price relative to the rest of the market. The way to make a profit with a software product is to offer unique value through innovation; such innovation comes in the form of proprietary products and intellectual property. To the extent that MySQL and Sun achieve such innovation that adds true value, they will be profitable. However, this is the hybrid model that Matt and others have now suggested is the only realistic business model. I know that you do not like intellectual property, but the trend has moved decisively in that direction.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=drupal
http://www.google.com/trends?q=firefox&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
http://www.google.com/trends?q=audacity&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
http://www.google.com/trends?q=vlc&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
I looked at the FOSS software that came to mind. Besides above; openoffice was almost flat, thunderbird has had a slight decline in the past few years, but Apache and Linux have both had a big decline in this semi-new century.
Only looking at one number doesn't seem to be good enough. The scale of one of the big losers is enough to obfuscate any apparent gain in the others. When was the last time I heard that "numbers don't lie"?
MySQL and PostGre was down, but so was Microsoft's SQL and Oracle. The only thing related to SQL that was holding it's own was SQLLITE.
I was surprised that PHP was down also despite the fact that Microsoft is now allowing it.
Is it possible that people are more inclined to search when something is new. But once they know the product, helpful websites, and there are more books out there then the need to search decreases. While FOSS may not be as ground-breaking as it was several years ago, that doesn't mean the interest is down.
"Red Hat Profit Rises on Sales to Budget-Minded Buyers" (December 22, 2008):
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGH406mUBH0M&refer=us
"3 stocks that blew the market away" (RedHat being the first one):
http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20081230/3_stocks_that_blew_the_market_away-id-1045988.html
"In terms of Novell's future, the Open Platform division, which includes SUSE Linux and other open source products that are distributed under a subscription model, sales rose by 36.1 per cent to $35.8m, and $30.5m of that was for Linux."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/novell_q4_2008_numbers/
"Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software"
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc20081130_069698.htm
...shall I continue, or do you get the idea? ;)
/P
I was questioning the value of using the Google Trends for one phrase as an indication of the interest in Open Source and pointing out that individual projects were growing while others were not.
You came up with a much better yardstick than Google Trends. People are voting with their pocketbooks for Open Source. In fact, those numbers indicate a growth in what Google Trends shows as a major decline.
What is more significant, sales or Inet searches? Depending on your web site's business model, in most cases I would choose the first.
- by wickenby December 31, 2008 1:30 AM PST
- ITRebel - be aware of Red Hat's declared policy on acquisition of Intellectual Property Rights and of the atmosphere created by the US patent laws, M$ et al.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- by odubtaig December 31, 2008 2:45 AM PST
- Careful now, you'll be expecting him to get MySQL AB's policy of reinvesting all revenue in expansion prior to their acquisition or to actually look up actual facts before shooting his 'mouth' off.
- Like this
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- by ITRebel December 31, 2008 4:50 AM PST
- Wickenby,
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(27 Comments)I really don't think anyone has anything to worry about when it comes to Red Hat and other partners acquiring patents - see the recent announcement of Linux Defenders.
Apparently his ill-informed speculation trumps direct statements from CEOs in that case so don't expect reality to come a knocking on his door when it comes to RH either.
Their behavior is that they are acquiring patents. Why are they doing this? I believe the reason is that it is impossible to protect innovation in this space without intellectual property rights. I would be interested though if you have another explanation for this apparent contradiction.