The state of open source: Competition and dissent

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

 

Matt Asay
Vice president of business development
Alfresco

Asay: We have a long way to go before open source is "perfect." Until we reach that point, I'd like everyone haggling vociferously. It's when we all agree that it will be time to get suspicious.

For the moment, I just want to see Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM develop their own vibrant corners of the open source universe. I want them at the table as full participants. This will require them to change some aspects of their business, but I think they'd find them revelatory rather than ruinous. These are some of the smartest companies on the planet. I'd love to see the open source communities they could create, if they but wanted to do so.

Bruce Perens
Creator of the Open Source Definition
Co-founder of the Open Source Initiative

Perens: This question is about seeing that open source is a much bigger thing than just one company, even if the company you're comparing it to is one of the world's largest. Is the United States damaged by the fact that it did not start out with just one presidential candidate and stick to that one? Of course not! Are we damaged because stores compete and there's more than one place to get most anything? Your Economics 101 student would know better. Competition, argument, and dissent are how we arrive at the optimal way to do things. If you want a trendy term, consider it a sort of prediction market.

One company, with one plan, can't do what an entire market can do. Marketing has no crystal ball. If marketing folks were that good at forecasting the future instead of designing products, they'd be at home trading stocks. So, what open source uses instead is the wisdom of an entire operating economy. We try almost everything, and we apply a Darwinistic filter to the result. The good projects gain a lot of attention, and the boring projects only waste one person's time. That is more effective at creating new innovation and getting it into people's hands than any one company with a plan can be.

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Jason Snyder is senior editor at InfoWorld.