Michael A. Olson has written an opinion piece for News.com about open source. He should know something about open source; he's the CEO of Sleepycat Software, maintainers and vendors of Berkeley DB.
A very simple, well-reasoned piece overall, but not much new here. Except this:
That question, though--how can vendors profit from open source?--was the wrong one to ask. The important question is, how can customers profit from open source?That doesn't address how to create and maintain a viable open source development project. Then again, there still isn't a sure-fire recipe to start a vibrant and useful open source project, either.If your company runs its own mail and Web servers, you're a big consumer of software. There are great open-source packages out there that you can use to provide those core services reliably and inexpensively. The big Internet service providers or Web portals and search engines, like Yahoo and Google, run a major part of their operations on open-source packages. If it works for them, it can work for you.
Rather than trying to figure out how to create sustainable, worthwhile and well-maintained open source projects, it seems more useful to just assume that open source will simply exist (as it has in one way or another for the last 20-30 years). Over time, the important projects will mature and develop their own ecosystems for development, maintenance and support. Sleepycat, Aladdin, Covalent and Sendmail have all figured out how to do this in a corporate friendly way; that pattern is likely to re-emerge when there's a demand for it to be repeated.
