As vice president of open source and standards at IBM, Robert Sutor is charged not only with advocating use of open source among IBM customers but also ensuring adherence to open source standards and policies within IBM.
InfoWorld spoke with Sutor on these and other matters pertaining to open source as part of its roundtable on the state of open source. Here's how Sutor sees the open source landscape evolving.
Robert Sutor
Vice president of open source and standards
IBM
InfoWorld: What do you see as the more pressing challenges and opportunities for open source given the current tech climate?
Sutor: I think the open source community has to focus on the final issues needed to really get broad adoption of Linux on the desktop. This means dealing with device drivers, breadth of applications, look and feel, and usability. To me, this means trying to make the Linux desktop as capable and as friendly as the Mac, rather than trying to emulate Windows, for example. In the same way, I want to see more open source applications be the recognized stars of their product categories and be the first to showcase innovations.
IW: Where do you see open source heading in the next five years, especially with regard to development, community, and market opportunities?
Sutor: I've been talking to a lot of people lately who were relatively early adopters of open source in customer environments but who are now looking to start new projects with their peers in their industries. When this next wave of people come in, it may unsettle some of the earlier understandings of expectations and "how things are supposed to work." Everyone will just need to adjust. I think the area of open source organizational governance will become very hot in the next few years. What are your policies on open source entering or leaving your organization? How do you deal with open source in the products that you create or that you OEM from other people? How do you do this efficiently across all your business units so that you avoid unnecessary conflicts yet drive the whole business forward? Who decides?
IW: Does widespread adoption and commercialization of open source software create new challenges or pressures for open source projects?
Sutor: I don't think there is a lot of common and good guidance out there for how a small open source project can deal with suddenly becoming very popular.
Similarly, it seems to take a long time for some open source projects to yield successful businesses based on them. I think we'll know open source has really arrived when every reputable business school spends a significant amount of time educating its students about the business models around open source. The new challenges and pressures will arise because of business issues, and not technology, in my opinion. We have many, many excellent developers in the open source communities. We need to have many, many more excellent "big picture" leaders emerging from and for those communities.
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