Matt Asay
Vice president of business development
Alfresco

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.

Sam Ramji
Senior director of platform technology
Microsoft

Ramji: In terms of challenges, I think you have to start with the fact that most software today -- whether measured by usage or by lines of code -- is not open source, and is sold or written by commercial organizations using a proprietary model. For established companies, the shift to open source is not just about understanding what the strategy should be -- it’s about “programmatizing” open source in an organization when the primary revenue model is around traditional.

It’s also important to distinguish between commercial and community software. The maturity models for assessing community software are not well-established yet, which results in some confusion about what projects are ready to adopt at what level of importance or mission-criticality. This is an unsolved issue and represents an opportunity for the next wave of software companies or consulting organizations.

Finally, the word “open source” has become used to describe development models, licensing models, community models, distribution models, sales and marketing models, philosophical and ethical models, and is now being applied to politics. Clearly there are powerful core concepts of transparency and sharing at the heart of this. It’s starting to blur the original ideas articulated by Eric Raymond, Danese Cooper, et al, which are about the source code itself and the developers who share it. The risk is that the term itself loses meaning over time, which is unfortunate as it’s a powerful idea.

Andy Astor
CEO
EnterpriseDB

Astor: The chief challenge open source faces is the need to tease apart the development and community model from the distribution and business model. Open source is used as a label for two very different things. First, as a way to develop software, and second, as a way to distribute and make money on software. Because the label is used interchangeably, the two get confused fairly often. As open source development and open source capitalists, like me, become more prevalent, the great challenge will be to recognize that there are two very different currents in the open source movement, each with its own particular requirements to succeed.