To get a glimpse of the changing face of open source, look no further than InfoWorld's "Future of Open Source" roundtable. Some of the thoughts expressed by various leaders in the open-source community are insightful, but that's not the real story.
No, the real story is who InfoWorld chose to profile.
Sure, you get the obligatory Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond call-outs, because these are two of the guys that formed the foundation of open source upon which the rest of us build. But they're the only throwbacks to the "good ol' days" of open source, back when open source was suspiciously anti-corporate (until Raymond and an elite group dubbed "free software" "open source").
Today? Nearly everyone on InfoWorld's list is corporate.
The companies represented include big companies (IBM, Microsoft, Google), small companies (Alfresco, Digium, Hyperic, EnterpriseDB), and in-between companies (MySQL/Sun).
It's perhaps this last one that demonstrates the profound change open source has made over the past three to four years. MySQL was and is a community favorite, but at a cost of $1 billion it has demonstrated the corporate value of open source and, indeed, has begun to alter its business model to ensure that it balances its free (developer) community with its paid (enterprise) community.
Dave Rosenberg writes that 2009 will be the year when open source becomes paid software, but I think we're already there. We've been there for at least two years, in fact. We just didn't know it.
InfoWorld's roundtable, however, makes it abundantly clear: open source is corporate, and that's a compliment, not a slight.
Bruce Perens wants to be an OSI board member. That's fine. But he also seems to want to engage in scorched earth political campaigns to get there. That's not so fine.
Bruce claims that the OSI is over-represented with vendors and, populist that he is, wants to return power to the "people" (i.e., developers). I can appreciate this. I made the same point about the Linux Foundation when it was formed from the ashes of the FSG and OSDL.
But this is where Bruce's candidacy loses some of its potency. To merit a board role, Bruce must show that he's for more than he's against, and he must show that he has actually done something for open source in the recent past. From his post we know that he's against Microsoft joining the OSI, but this is a strawman, as is his fight against special (corporate) interests channeling the OSI's energies. But tilting at strawmen isn't enough to justify an OSI board role.
As an outgoing board member, and perhaps the most corporate of the bunch, I wanted to respond specifically to Bruce's insinuations. In so doing, I'm speaking as Matt Asay, and not for the OSI.
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