If I needed a clear sign that commercial open source is alive and well, reading Roberto Galoppini's remarks on the five Open Innovation Awards winners provided that and more. I used to be able to count every open-source company on two hands. Galoppini mentioned four of which I've never heard.
I'll feel a lot better, however, when we hear less about vendors writing open-source software and more about enterprise IT releasing open-source code.
You have nothing to lose...
While some governments (the U.K. most notable among them, as Glyn Moody highlights) fear coloring outside the lines of proprietary software, others, like the Mongolian government, which has moved all of its Web sites to open-source Joomla, have embraced open source as a way to lower costs and increase vendor independence.
The companies and governments that get the most from open source, however, are those that view technology as a competitive differentiator and look to open source to deliver "high productivity, flexibility, robustness and considerably lower costs," like the London Stock Exchange recently discovered in its move to Linux.
For such organizations, it's time to start contributing back. No, not because doing so is somehow morally superior to using but not writing open-source software, but rather because there are tangible business benefits to contributing open-source code.
Take The New York Times, for example, which is releasing its Document Viewer under an open-source license within the next few weeks. According to BayNewser, Aron Pilhofer, the Times' editor for interactive newsroom technologies, said this is:
"a recognition that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies." The shift toward open source software will strengthen journalism and transparency, Pilhofer said, because it enables news companies to leverage the smarts of large communities of software developers and technologically skilled journalists outside of the Times to continually improve the software...
[T]he Times expects that other organizations that use the tool will build new functionality on top the Times' code and then, in true open source spirit, share their enhancements back so that all organizations using of the Document Viewer will benefit.
This is precisely the sort of thinking that could lead the media industry out of its current struggles and into a more productive, collaborative future. Open source is no panacea for struggling newspapers, but it does offer a compelling way to increase outside contributions, improve user interaction, and help make its future a communal effort.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been calling on enterprise IT to contribute back to open-source projects. His is not a plea for charity. It's a call to recognize and fuel self-interest.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I read an intriguing article in The Atlantic over the weekend, discussing the probable implosion to The New York Times and what its future may be. One paragraph, in particular, struck me:
At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it, the Times as we know it, will no longer exist...What would a post-print Times look like?
Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow the Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it.
In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters--now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases--could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting in with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world, unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.
This is a similar prognostication to what I offered up recently, one that I find increasingly compelling.
Ironically, my very presence here on CNET may confirm it. CNET's Blog Network is filled with non-CNET employees, like me. We offer CNET breadth, allowing CNET's staff reporters to offer depth in particular areas of interest (e.g., Stephen Shankland focuses on Google and Yahoo, as well as search, online advertising, portals, and digital photography). That depth will then be picked up by other publications to feed its breadth, while they choose to go deep in other areas.
Symbiotic, interesting, and effective. So long as the depth is strong, people will pay for access to that content, be it through subscriptions (I am and hope to always be a paid subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, as there's little more comforting than reading it on my couch at the end of a day), advertisements, or some other means.
Such a strategy enables the media to be many things to many people without having to undergo the burden of failing to be all things to all people. I think it's a winner.
"The die is cast," declared Julius Caesar, anticipating Microsoft's fateful decision to protect its Windows cash cow at all costs.
Years later, as Joe Nocera eloquently opines in The New York Times, Microsoft has tethered itself to its Windows operating system and almost certainly lost its way on the Internet as a result:
Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and newspaper businesses....Bill Gates saw this coming many years ago.... But in the subsequent decade-plus, the company has been unable to keep it from happening. Think about it: do you really care anymore which operating system you use?
Microsoft opted to try to harness the Web to accompany its desktop monopoly, but the Web is too big to serve as handmaiden to any one company's monopoly. Microsoft needs to learn to serve the Web, not the other way around.
The more Microsoft seeks to protect its past (i.e., desktop monopoly and all the revenue that comes with it), the less relevant it will be to the future. Microsoft hopes to straddle the two, and maybe it will succeed. But its desktop anchor may well end up sinking the ship.
What do you get when you cross one of the world's premier news sources with open-source software? Increasingly, you get The New York Times, plus a dose of confusion from the development community as to why a newspaper would want to share source code.
New York Times senior software architects Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid say they've received a mixed reception from the community, because some people just can't understand why a print media company would jump feet first into the open source philosophy. But open source software use isn't new to the Times, says Gottfrid. "I've been here a number of years, and open source has always played an integral part in everything we do."
Recently, the team has experienced growth, according to Gottfrid, in that custom applications developed in-house are "shifting from a proprietary posture. As we were building out and replacing old infrastructure, there were some gaps, so we wrote additional code. And some of those things we're open-sourcing. It's a small, humble effort."
Oddly, it's an effort that hasn't been much appreciated within the open-source development community, for some inexplicable reason. Developers have been slow to grok the reasons behind the newspaper's development efforts. But, according to its developers, Jacob Harris and Derek Gottfrid, it's clear:
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