Matt Asay, founder and program director of the Open Source Business Conference, opened the recent OSBC event in Boston saying the third wave of open source is arriving.
He characterized the first wave as adoption of Linux, the second as the acceptance of open source database and application servers, and this third wave as the emergence of applications.
But not applications as we know them. “Applications that are in a perpetual state of beta,” Asay said. “They are put out there, and customers download them, but they are never really done.” While fully functional, the programs keep evolving iteratively, creating what Asay called softerware.
Companies from Novell to Google are beginning to work this way, he said, and he expects others to follow suit. He believes the open source movement is more about changing the way software is sold and distributed than how it is developed.
In a keynote speech Hal Stern, Sun’s CTO of software, argued that perpetual beta isn’t a bad thing. “We need to stop thinking about software as a manufactured asset and rather as something organic.”
But he doesn’t see open source displacing large software companies, simply because it is hard to get people to develop stuff for free. The community, he said, is perfect for incremental innovation, the goal behind Sun’s OpenSolaris project.
Regarding the application wave, Stern predicts more vendors will pick up open source projects and host them as services instead of trying to package them for sale.
While agreeing that the application segment is the most exciting part of the open source movement, Novell’s newly appointed CEO, Ron Hovsepian, said that acceptance has been slow, because “we’re asking too much of customers. They have to be the systems integrator. We have to do a better job of packaging.”
David Skok, a partner with venture company Matrix Partners, hosted an after-hours debate among buyers and suppliers and gave the OSBC crowd the highlights the next morning.
One thing the two sides agree on, Skok said, is that open source will never become mainstream on the desktop. The summary judgment: “It’s pennies on the dollar. Who cares?”
The group also agreed that customers who buy open source products don’t change or modify the code, one of the vaunted benefits of open source. Nonetheless, buyers say access to the source code has value, if only for diagnostics.
Who won the debate? “The buyers always win,” Skok said.
