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.
I was confused when Dave Rosenberg told me that he was leaving MuleSource to pursue a game startup. "But you are already the CEO of a startup," I remonstrated. Given his longstanding interest in video games, however, it was probably just a matter of time.
Of course, that was nothing next to my confusion when I kept reading about Digium-founder Mark Spencer hanging out with Marc Fleury, working on an open-source home automation project called OpenRemote. The OpenRemote blog suggests that Digium remains Spencer's primary home, but that he moonlights as the principal hardware designer for OpenRemote.
This morning Dries Buytaert of Drupal/Acquia fame confused me further by announcing Mollom, a "startup Benjamin Schrauwen and [Buytaert] began to help keep your website free of spam."
I asked Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing for Acquia, the company that Dries co-founded, whether Dries was still fully engaged with Acquia, and he told me,
... Read more
I'm falling behind on the blogging (Hey, it's my end of quarter!) but thought these articles/posts were too good to let slip:
- Digium is apparently doubling revenue each year. Given that it was doing $10 million (at least) two years ago, if memory serves, we may be looking at our next open-source IPO.
- Red Hat received kudos from Gartner and Forrester. In particular, Forrester's report has an awesome statistic: "86 percent of JBoss users are confident that it can handle their largest workloads." I guess presence, not absence, makes the heart grow fonder.
- Shlomfish tackles the age-old question of "What makes software high quality?" It has an exhaustive answer worth plowing through.
- The 451 Group suggests that the real Linux desktop race has just begun, with Linux trumping Windows in ultraportables. Worth watching.
Finally, Aggiorno discovers that most of the Fortune 500 fail to use web standards properly, noting "rendering web pages is such a complex task because of the lack of use of standards." Amen.
That's it for now. I'm caught up! Well, sort of. There are a few posts I'm itching to get out on Bitrock, Microsoft, and a few others, but I may have to do those late tonight.
Most people will never have heard of Asterisk, yet it's a sure bet that an increasing number of these same people make calls with it each day. This week, Asterisk registered its 1,000,000th download, while the company behind Asterisk, Digium, continued its dominance with its 24th straight quarter of growth.
Is there an end in sight for Digium's/Asterisk's success? Not anytime soon, it would appear. Tim O'Reilly has called Asterisk the industry's most under-appreciated open-source success story, and he's probably right, though it depends on whom you ask. Industry pundits may not give it the credit it's due, but customers certainly are.
Congratulations to Mark and team!
I've long been an admirer of Digium, the company behind Asterisk, the world's leading open-source telephony platform. Tim O'Reilly has been a longtime proponent of Digium and Asterisk, but I admit that I haven't paid enough attention to the telephony market to understand its importance fully.
I was fortunate to spend some time on the phone with Mark Spencer, founder of Digium and the Asterisk project, and he set me straight on how Digium is doing (Teaser: Exceptionally well), and what it's like to seed a market for one's competition:
... Read more
Surely, 3Com could have written its own VoIP software. In fact, it has, releasing two new products recently based on its own technology. But the more interesting release is its OEM'ing of Digium's Asterisk-based VOIP appliance.
"Digium is the leader in open source telephony, so we are partnering with the most significant company in that space," [3Com marketing director Kevin] Flanagan said. "By taking the [Digium] Asterisk Appliance and placing a 3Com UI on it and supporting it with our Global Service organization, which we believe no other open source telephony provider can do, we are making this technology available to even the smallest businesses and organizations."
I view this as a toe dip for 3Com. If successful, undoubtedly it will end up going even farther with Digium/Asterisk. Why reinvent a wheel that the open-source community is already building?
Digium is still acquisition fodder itself, but the company has decided to do an acquisition of its own, purchasing one of its partners, Switchvox, as CRN reports:
Digium is stirring up the open-source community it helped create by buying one of the vendors that has built an IP-PBX on its Asterisk VoIP platform.... Read more
Digium Thursday will unveil plans to acquire Switchvox, one of the many SMB-focused vendors that have cropped up in recent years with products built on top of Digium's open-source Asterisk VoIP software. Digium is the primary developer of Asterisk.
Most of the CEO profiles we've done have covered CEOs who serve the enterprise IT market. To an extent, Danny Windham, CEO of Digium, does the same. But Digium's market - Telecom - is broader than that. This is the company whose modest goal is to open the world of communications...from Alabama.
In fact, this is one of the things I like best about Digium: it is yet another proofpoint that in open source, anyway, it's not important to be based in the Bay Area. World domination of Telecom from Huntsville, Alabama. Who would have thought?
Name, position, and company of executive
... Read more
Danny Windham, CEO, Digium.
- prev
- 1
- next
