The state of open source: Avenues for acceptance
Roundtable: 11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead
Follow @infoworldQuestion 4: What are the next steps needed for open source as a software production methodology to reach the next level?
Matt Asay
Vice president of business development
Alfresco
Asay: If by "the next level" you mean widespread adoption, commercial success, and rampant fear within the proprietary vendors, aren't we already there? Seriously, open source has proved its merits as a commercial and development methodology. The only thing remaining is for a few industry laggards to stop consolidating long enough to realize that they have more to gain from open source than lose, but to gain they must act immediately.
Chris DiBona
Open source programs manager
Google
DiBona: The marketplace is still trying to understand open source, and so a better question is, How long until the business world understands how to best use and take part in open source software development? I think the answer for some companies is never; and others, well, that depends on the company.
Robert Sutor
Vice president of open source and standards
IBM
Sutor: More software development companies need to adopt internal software development models based on what we have learned from open source communities. We need more best-selling books on open source development models that are bought and studied by mainstream programmers. We need more people to ask, "Why wouldn't we open source this?" We need to better reward developers by recognizing merit and earned technical reputation.
Mark Spencer
Founder and CTO
Digium
