The open-source business (model) revolution
Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's newly minted vice president of Middleware, may be relatively new to the open-source game, but already he has picked up on its greatest strength. Yes, it is a winning development methodology. Yes, it can enable superior code.
But it's singular strength for a business guy like me is its unparalleled value for the customer and for the vendor in smacking around competitors. Craig notes in a Linux.com interview:
I think very certainly there's tech innovation, but I think there's also business innovation, which is trying to find a better way to create software, have more flexibility, and build a business that's both beneficial for the business that we're building as a vendor, and beneficial for the customers. People talk about tech disruption...
...but at the end of the day this is really business disruption and it's a model of business. I've been in the software industry over 20 years and what's cool for me is the business mode is so much radically different than what anyone has ever done. It has benefits for customers, benefits for us, it's very fascinating.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Open source is a "ground up" (to continue to employ Muzilla's words) sales phenomenon. It's a way of "leaking" into a company until the software is so pervasive that an enterprise CIO has no alternative but to buy. It's not too dissimilar from how Microsoft has long pushed its products into enterprises...
...except that it doesn't rely on monopoly, illegal tying, etc.
The rest of the interview is great, too. Muzilla talks about the JBoss strategy and how open source enables Red Hat's business. But for me, the most salient point of all is the recognition that open source is simply a better way to do business.
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.
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What I am getting at is that with all the questions circling Red Hat execution on the JBoss front, why would they not vet the talking points of the GM, in terms of his previous prediction of claiming "50% of deployments" a few weeks back, or in this case that open source is the competitive advantage? I just don't see it as all that unusual anymore: is not everyone OSS? The real advantage of JBoss is ongoing innovation, including Hibernate, Seam, Blacktie, and jBPM, in the face of serious competitive attempts from Glassfish, Geronimo, and Spring.
I understand the basis of your blog, Matt, but there is more than just being OSS, you got to put together something that customers want to use, including developers, because there are just too many options out there. Muzilla, well, I am rooting for him, though I think Glassfish has an angle on him that even Marc has recently acknowledged, but this whole thing that being open source will carry the day reminds me of when WebLogic guys got cocky in 2002 and thought that being the mainstay of J2EE was good enough for ongoing dominance.
JBoss faces a real test, its tougher being the incumbent, the insurgents have all of the wiggle-room, and in some cases, all of the resources, to make a serious run at the prize of middleware champ. Talking about OSS as anything that major belies a mis-representation or even a mid-understanding of what its going to take to beat .Net and all the Java challengers...I'm just saying I'm under-impressed, though sincerely wish him well, Muzilla probably has one of the top 3 most important software jobs in the industry (integrating WebLogic and integrating MySQL come to mind as the other 2)....
Tina