Open source is the new innovation platform
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
According to a managing director at the Bank of New York Mellon, open source is not about commodification. That's the pedestrian role served by proprietary software. Instead, open-source software is about innovation and competitive differentiation.
I was fortunate to speak at the Linux on Wall Street conference in New York today, and came away having learned much from my co-presenters, Stuart Cohen (CEO, Collaborative Software Initiative), Stan Rose (Managing Director, Technology Risk Management, Bank of New York Mellon), and Eben Moglen (Director and Co-Founder, Software Freedom Law Center). For the record, I'm fairly certain that Eben Moglen is the smartest person to have ever walked this earth. I could have listened to him all day....
Stan Rose of the Bank of New York Mellon, also impressed me. He gave some insight into how his company views open source, and I got the sense that he's not alone in this. In a nutshell, financial services companies like Bank of New York Mellon increasingly view open source as the foundation of choice for their innovation. For non-differentiating software (like a general ledger system), they use proprietary software, but would likely prefer to use an open-source alternative where these exist.
Get that? Proprietary software is essentially for IT that doesn't provide a competitive advantage. Open source is what you use in applications that really matter for setting you apart from the competition.
IT, in sum, does matter, but some IT (read: open source) matters more than others. We've come a long way in such a short time in how we look at open source.
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. 
we would like to point out that our limited company systems integrator ?Integrator of Open Technologies? located in Russia is a member of the exhibition Interop 2008, 24 april (http://www.interop.ru/?page=confopensource2008&language=eng) where you will be the principal speaker.
During the exhibition we are planning to share our experience of introduction of Alfresco and to tell about the abilities of Alfresco for potential customers.
We consider that you chose the right moment to speak at the exhibition because favourable conditions for the promotion of Open Source products are forming at present in Russia.
The customers who are interested in Alfresco address us, so we?ve got an opportunity to promote Alfresco on Russian market.
We want very much to you personally and to share with him our plans of promotion of Alfresco on Russian market.
Our stand on the exhibition Interop 2008: ?110.
e-mail:ikrikovtsev@iopent.ru
Ivan Krikovtsev
Director general
Integrator of Open Technologies