Open source is a platform, not a product
The platform wars are over, and open source has won. It's not that open source has displaced Windows or the iPhone or anything else, but that every platform will necessarily include open source. It's simply too expensive and too difficult to go it alone anymore, whether you're an aspiring start-up or Microsoft.
IDC captures this thought in a recent Asia Pacific survey, which highlights open-source software as a foundation for flexible platforms, rather than as point solutions:
Vendors position [open source] as a solution, rather than a point product, by customizing to the needs of specific verticals....Other perceived benefits of adopting open source, apart from the traditional cost savings, include no vendor lock-in, access to the source code, and the flexibility to further customize the software to match individual needs. All these in turn increase the ease of integration with the existing infrastructure of an organization, as well as the compatibility with different platforms. This gives the organization an opportunity to use and test open source without changing their whole IT infrastructure.
It's this flexibility that is arguably open source's biggest benefit, and why companies like Yahoo are actively contributing to open-source projects. Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing, Shelton Shugar, argues,
We believe that the developer community is a key component in making Yahoo! a success. The challenges the industry is facing today in terms of large-scale, global cloud solutions are bigger than any one company (big or small) is able to solve on its own. As we contribute to the [open-source] community, we also learn from the community, and third party developers are a valuable resource helping to speed innovation.
Companies that care about developers must care about open source. Like Amazon with its Kindle. Or Microsoft, whose CEO famously sang the praises of developers. So long as Google and its crowd compete using open source, Microsoft will, of necessity, follow suit.
It's not about peace and love. It's about capitalism and competition. That's the new face of open source.
This isn't to suggest that the world will go 100 percent open source tomorrow. But we'll see a lot more open source as vendors strive to meet CIO's need to cut costs while boosting productivity, and as they seek to become flexible platforms to meet the demands of increasingly complex enterprise IT requirements.
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. 
Open source now has a place at the table, but there are still TONS of professions and industries where people are locked into proprietary applications and platforms that at most play some lip service to 'open' something or other. We have a long way to go.
If it infiltrates every eco-system, then the combined effort is like a platform.
@ArtInvent - "like Linux, the Wintel PC, the Mac, the iPhone, or Android."
From an open source standpoint let?s look at the list.
Linux - obvious
Wintel - Limited Open Source, but Microsoft has released some of their code as GPL2.
Mac - BSD based
iPhone - BSD based
Android - Linux based.
I agree on the desktop Windows still rules, but this article I believe is about the platform for enterprises, it is not about what O/S you use to run your email client and word processor.
Open Source is really growing and from a platform standpoint is winning.
The cost of entry is lower ? the flexibility is higher.
To see the shift in adoption just look at the up and coming tech providers. Most of the new wave of solutions are built on Open Source platforms.
From an open source standpoint let?s look at the list.
Linux - obvious
Wintel - Limited Open Source, but Microsoft has released some of their code as GPL2.
Mac - BSD based
iPhone - BSD based
Android - Linux based.
I agree on the desktop Windows still rules, but this article I believe is about the platform for enterprises, it is not about what O/S you use to run your email client and word processor.
Open Source is really growing and from a platform standpoint is winning.
The cost of entry is lower ? the flexibility is higher.
To see the shift in adoption just look at the up and coming tech providers. Most of the new wave of solutions are built on Open Source platforms.
Another issue with "closed source" is that the vendor / producer can (and will) someday change it so you either have a very expensive (sometimes impossible) task to adapt your business to that - with open source the timeframe is either longer or you may, assuming good people in company, to "branch" the software (keeping in mind that open source not always free) or to develop your own version. Happens more often than people think - hardware / environments change and the vendor / producer may or may not change their software to support that. I have had too many of those in my life!
- by pentest September 30, 2009 5:20 PM PDT
- Open source is a license that meets certain criteria. Nothing else, not a platform, nor a product nor anything else you want to pretend that it is.
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