Why Open Source Will Rule the Software World

About five years ago a CIO that I worked for once told me that eventually all "for profit" software companies would be overrun by Open Source software companies. I thought he was absolutely crazy at the time. Sure Apache had made in roads in regard to the web server market share at that point and Tomcat was doing ok as the reference implementation for Sun's Java servlet container but... come on. But I did stop to think about it... This guy was a retired partner from a major consulting firm who was really working because he wanted something to do and had proven on many occasions to be a very insightful and brilliant man. Now, looking at the Open Source software world I am convinced once again that he may have been crazy... but in that "there is a fine line between genius and insanity" kind of way.

It looks like even world beater Cisco may not be safe from the pressures of Open Source. A project called Vyatta is picking up steam and really looks like its is going to bring some disruption to the otherwise boring networking gear market. Why is this simple little product disruptive to a 5 billion dollar industry? Well... its an open source router... with all the features of high end network equipment... at one fifth the cost. This product is currently in beta but due for release soon. In an recent article in Business 2.0 it was explained that this project was started because researcher Atanu Ghosh was studying the future of broadband and knew that to make changes to router software, he had to submit them to Cisco or some other slow moving network leviathan. So he and some colleagues decided to write their own, caught the eye of an early Cisco employee and some venture capitalists (there is an interesting note in and of itself... venture capital firms are now funding open source software companies...) and viola. This will be a fun one to watch.

Bernard Golden had an interesting series in his blog on CIO Magazine's blog site about why open source is not only a safe choice for companies but the smart choice. In the latest installment he takes an example of a company with 32 million in revenue that has chosen JBoss as their application server. They could have chosen BEA but instead of paying 500k they paid 50k. What happened to the other 450k? That 1.5% of their annual revenues would instead be able to go into product development, salaries, or any of the other things a growing company needs.

What has made this shift in perception and belief from open source being cool but for companies who could risk their own support to software that is available and real for everyone? My opinion is that the ecosystems for open source has changed. Companies are seeing both the financial benefits of open source. Really, off the shelf software has always been a strange model with all costs in the construction and after that it essentially being free. (maintenance, support etc obvious exceptions and in custom software where the majority of the costs actually end up) Now you can download the software, see if it works for you, if it does you can get support from third parties if it is needed or even participate in the open source community as a company for the support you need. (Who would you rather have answering your email for support, a call desk person who knows what's in a system from the manual and has a series of steps to obfuscate real help or a developer who develops code in the system as part of their job?)