The state of open source: Missteps and lessons learned

Roundtable: 11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead

 

Robert Sutor
Vice president of open source and standards
IBM

Sutor: I wouldn't call this a misstep, but I'm dismayed when I see the relatively small efforts put behind industry-specific open source projects. Outside of education and the public sector in general, there are very few projects that have gotten a lot of attention and adoption. I love it when I see Sakai and Moodle doing well and competing in the education and learning area. We need to repeat that in insurance, banking, automotive, retail, energy, telecommunications, and all the other industries. Another thing I think we need to do is better promote and laud the free and open source heroes from around the world. These people have literally changed the IT industry, yet outside of a few well-known folks, many of them are relatively obscure.

Zack Urlocker
Vice president of products
MySQL

Urlocker: I don't think there have been significant missteps at all. Here's an example. For 10 years, companies like IBM, Apple, and others attempted to dethrone Microsoft's lock on operating systems. They all failed and threw in the towel. Fast forward to today. What's the fastest growing server operating system? It's Linux, a platform developed by a student hacker out of Finland. The power of open source did what billion-dollar companies could not do. The lesson learned is that if you solve the right problem in a transparent fashion, you can make good software very popular through open source. Open source software like Linux, MySQL, and others have greatly disrupted the old ways of the software industry, and that's put more power in the hands of the buyers. That's a good thing.

Chris DiBona
Open source programs manager
Google

DiBona: Best lesson learned: Careful selection of your project developers is what matters.

Big missteps: I think that the world of open source doesn't pay enough attention to what the BSD operating system flavors are doing. The open, net, and free BSD communities are pretty remarkable and deserve greater recognition for their work.

Biggest misstep: It always comes down to one thing: bad code. Accepting bad code = bad project. Bad code kills open source projects dead.

[ Roundtable home | Topic No. 6: Visions of utopia ]

Jason Snyder is senior editor at InfoWorld.