Open source roundtable: Dave Rosenberg

Mulesource CEO views enterprise and VC interest as key indicators of open source's potential to lay claim to the core

 

There are too many lessons learned to count, so I would say that open source projects and companies should have been much more aggressive at proving use cases in mission-critical environments. This has been going on for quite some time but has only started to get noticed in the last year or so.

IW: If you could wave your wand and create the perfect software "universe," what would it look like?

Rosenberg: I believe the future of software is a combination of open source and SaaS. Software consumers are much less interested in building giant applications and instead want to address problems immediately. Open source gives customers control over their infrastructure and SaaS provides instant gratification for applications that have to date been very cumbersome.

In the near term, the key to the universe is open standards and interoperability, which somehow still isn’t ubiquitous.

IW: There has been a fair amount of controversy, competition, and dissent within the various open source communities. Does this lack of agreement damage the long-term goals of open source, or would you like to see more of this?

Rosenberg: I think we have just enough as it stands. One of the interesting psychological aspects of open source is the fact that it brings together very smart, very interested people. In a sense, open source has created a new development civilization that comes with inherent conflict to develop a greater good. Were it not for this conflict, I don’t think we’d be nearly as far as we are today.

Roundtable home page: The state of open source

Other roundtable participants
• Matt Asay
Vice president of business development, Alfresco
• Andy Astor
CEO of EnterpriseDB
• Chris DiBona
Open source programs manager, Google
• Bruce Perens
Creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative
• Sam Ramji
Senior director of platform technology strategy, Microsoft
• Eric S. Raymond
Programmer, author, and open source software advocate
• Javier Soltero
CEO, Hyperic
• Mark Spencer
Founder and CTO, Digium
• Robert Sutor
Vice president of open source and standards, IBM
• Zack Urlocker
Vice president of products, MySQL

Jason Snyder is senior editor at InfoWorld.