Open source roundtable: Matt Asay

As Open Source Business Conference content chair and vice president of business development at open source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco, Matt Asay is well-versed in the challenges open source projects face in capitalizing on today's business opportunities.

InfoWorld spoke with Asay about these and other open source issues as part of its roundtable on the state of open source. Here's how Asay sees the open source movement evolving.

Matt Asay
Vice president of business development
Alfresco

InfoWorld: What do you see as the most pressing challenges and opportunities for open source given the current tech climate?

Asay: On the one hand, in a recession we typically see a "flight to value." Alfresco includes veterans from Oracle, Documentum, Business Objects, and others. We've weathered these downturns before. Oracle, for example, has emerged stronger from each downturn because, at the time, it offered significant value for the money. The tables have turned now, and I suspect we'll see companies like MySQL cutting into the proprietary incumbents. Well-run open source projects -- community-sponsored and corporate-sponsored -- deliver superior technology at a lower cost. Hence, open source should actually gain ground on proprietary software in a recession.

That said, as IT budgets dry up, there will be much less inclination to bet on new projects. At least, not those that require significant capital investment. What we may end up seeing is a lot of dabbling in open source during the recession, preparing to ramp up payments into open source once the economy resumes growth.

IW: Where do you see open source heading in the next five years, especially with regard to development, community, and market opportunities?

Asay: We have demonstrated that it's possible to kick-start successful open source projects with venture capital. As such, I believe we'll see a real flowering of commercial open source projects with significant competition within markets. We're seeing this today in the IT management market, with Hyperic, GroundWork, Zenoss, and others competing aggressively for market share. In the enterprise content management market, Alfresco finally got a real peer in Acquia. This is good and indicates that the best is yet to come in commercial open source.

I also believe we're going to see the proliferation of projects like Eclipse, Linux, and Firefox -- projects that command significant commercial investment, simultaneously serving as hubs for competition and collaboration. As such projects flourish, we'll see greater innovation because each individual market participant won't have to reinvent the wheel and will instead innovate around the edges of communal projects.

IW: Does widespread adoption and commercialization of open source software create new challenges or pressures for open source projects?