(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.
I loved this interview with Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center. Most people don't realize just how profoundly involved Eben is in all things free and open source. Whether it's the opening up of Microsoft protocols for Samba or representing the Linux community against pillaging from proprietary companies, Eben is there.
Despite being branded a bit of a communist, Eben is actually a true capitalist (a "copyleft capitalist" as he calls it). He understands, as the proprietary world is beginning to understand, that business depends on a commons, and not necessarily on locking up every shred of saleable value:
...[Y]ou're saying that open source is basically changing the attitudes of traditional companies?
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I think the world of Eben Moglen, and loved this statement by him from an interview given to Computerworld:
...Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and necessary model....But Microsoft, too, has now fundamentally recognized that there is not another generation left in the proprietary software idea and [it is] trying to move to a world in which it can leverage the remaining value of its monopoly in a world of mixed free and unfree code.
Microsoft has an opportunity to change, and I believe it's slowly (very slowly) making that change. It won't happen today and it won't happen next year, but Microsoft over time may well make the shift as subscription-based revenue models catch on, allowing it to unshackle itself from the license model.
It could happen. Microsoft just needs to take care not to try to force its old model onto the new world (through patent FUD and such). It will find that the open-source world cares just as much about IP as Microsoft does. Perhaps more. Just in different ways.
Eben Moglen (left) tells it like it is.
(Credit: James Duncan Davidson)Once upon a time, the term "open source" was coined to save the free-software world from itself--or, rather, from the free-software zealots, as you can read on the Open Source Initiative's Web site.
Today, I can't help but feel that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where we're so self-satisfied with the money we're making off open source that we have neglected the essential freedoms that make open-source profit possible.
The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week's O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Some, including software consultant Stephen Walli, don't like the way Eben said it. I wasn't in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I'm not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.
Why?
... Read moreAs Steven Vaughan-Nichols is reporting, the Software Freedom Law Center is offering a free day of open-source legal education from the best in the business. Let's put it this way: if you get any opportunity to hear Eben Moglen speak, you take it. Especially when admission to the event is free.
The Summit will have two parts: a closed session in the morning for a private meeting of some of the world's foremost FOSS attorneys, and an open session in the afternoon consisting of free legal presentations to the public.
... Read more
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