I opened my RSS reader today and was swept back to 2007, when I and others fussed about what constitutes an open-source vendor.
Matt Aslett of The 451 Group and Savio Rodrigues of IBM have thoughts of their own, which mostly make sense. I'd go so far as to say they're right.
But do we care anymore?
No one wasted more digital ink on the topic than I did, but even I don't care anymore. Open source is bleeding into the way everyone does software, including Microsoft. It remains critically important, but I suspect that it won't even be able to support a marketing campaign in the near future.
Today we talk about Pentaho and Jaspersoft as "open-source business intelligence vendors," for example, but three years from now, I doubt that we'll call out the open-source aspect. It won't matter--or, at least, it won't matter nearly as much. Their competitors, from IBM's Cognos to SAP's Business Objects, will also incorporate aspects of open source into their businesses. They'll have to.
The open-source debate is over. We won. Now it's just a question of building (or continuing to build) superior products and ensuring that we get paid for doing so.
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The 451 Group's Matt Aslett believes that a perfect storm is brewing for serious mergers and acquisitions around open source in 2009. Having a (literally) vested interest in the matter, I'd like to see his prophecy come true.
Aslett provides a long list of reasons to suppose that 2009 is the year of the open-source buyout, among them:
- Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of entering adjacent markets.
- Proprietary vendors see open source as a means of expanding reach and a potential source of upsell opportunities.
I've written on this second reason before, arguing that open source provides a hugely efficient way to discover new customers. Call it the Poor Man's Oracle Strategy: instead of acquiring new customer territory through multibillion-dollar acquisitions, you do it for free through open-source downloads, and then upsell those prospects.
It's clear that there is much value that open source can bring proprietary vendors as a business strategy. But I find Aslett's reasons for open-source vendors selling to proprietary vendors much more intriguing, among them:
- Commercial-licensing strategies provide the opportunity for growth but are relatively expensive to develop.
- As proprietary vendors will be looking to open source to extend their reach into new potential customers, many open-source vendors will be looking to proprietary technology as a means of converting community interest into revenue.
In other words, while I've tended to focus on all the benefit the proprietary world can glean from open source, there's clearly also a lot of value that open-source vendors will find in the arms of proprietary vendors. There's a symbiosis forming in the software industry right now, one that marries the benefits of open source (for customers) and proprietary software (for vendors).
This may not be the year we see this symbiosis consummated through acquisitions, but it's definitely a trend and will play itself out over the next few years.
My question: Will Red Hat and Sun Microsystems get to the open-source start-ups before the proprietary vendors do? On the face of the evidence so far, the answer is no. Zimbra went to Yahoo, XenSource went to Citrix, etc.
Relatively few open-source companies have found themselves merged into the big open-source vendors, a fulfillment of Tim O'Reilly's suggestion that "virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company."
2009 should prove interesting for the software world. The only thing I can predict with certainty is a distinct lack of stasis. That, as well as the likelihood that Microsoft will acquire its first open-source company in 2009, probably Zend or another complementary technology vendor. The times, they are a' changin'.
Matt Aslett of The 451 Group and I met in London this morning, and discussed a range of issues. One thing that came up, which Aslett discusses on his blog, was the furor over CPAL, AGPL, and other open-source licensing designed for the Internet. I heavily contributed to that furor but, looking back, it would seem that the concerns were almost completely overblown.
Mea culpa.
A year and a half later, very few open-source projects use the CPAL license, which introduced a specific form of graphical attribution for open-source projects. There was sound around it, and there was fury, but the reality is the world didn't end when the OSI blessed CPAL, neither with a bang nor with a whimper. It simply ignored the licenses, even though a few prominent open-source companies like Zimbra still use CPAL licensing.
Affero General Public License (AGPL)? Fabrizio Capobianco cheered its progress recently, and I continue to believe it has a valuable role to fill, but the reality is that it powers 181 open-source projects out of more than 180,000, according to Palamida, and most of the projects that have adopted it are no-name projects.
Despite our efforts to tweak open-source licensing to fit the realities of Web-based "distribution" of software, the world still revolves around L/GPL, BSD/Apache, and MPL. I doubt this is going to change anytime soon.
Why? Because customers don't care about this issue. Just as they don't care about whether 100 percent of their code is open source, they also don't care about vendors protecting their code from other vendors. They just want software that works. If freedom comes with that, all the better, but they don't fetish licenses the way open-source vendors and communities do.
License proliferation, badgeware, and all the other "big" open-source licensing debates have turned out to be somewhat hollow in retrospect. Customers are voting for open-source software, not open-source licenses. There is a difference.
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