April 9, 2008 8:31 AM PDT
Open source and innovation: A match made in heaven
CIO.com suggests that open source may be the future of enterprise innovation, echoing the Bank of New York Mellon's comments on the subject last week. The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source.
Riffing off the Eclipse Foundation's Mike Milinkovich, CIO.com writes:
[I]f you develop in an open source model and other companies adopt what you develop, you have a higher chance of longevity in the code base. In other words, you can develop a custom solution to a unique business problem with less fear that your solution will turn into a dead-end legacy system when things, inevitably, change in a few years. Milinkovich also sees more CIOs banding together with industry peers to develop common open-source solutions to standard industry processes, thereby saving money by sharing costs and ensuring interoperability.
Amen. Proprietary software is all about vendor-driven innovation. Open source is all about user-driven innovation, collaboratively married to vendor innovation. It's a two-way street, and it's much, much better for both vendors and users.
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. 
