The open source year 2006 is coming to an end. While we often see things moving rather slowly from a day to day perspective, it is quite amazing how massively open source is changing the software industry by looking at the year in review:
- Open source companies have made significant commercial progress and doubled their business, incl. MySQL, JBoss, and db4objects, further validating the economic power of open source
- Red Hat's $420M acquisition of JBoss has shown investors where the money is in open source. As a result a lot of me-too open source start-ups receive a lot of funds, usually too much and too early, which will sure enough result in a backlash in the future
- Several incumbent vendors have further adopted open source practices into their business strategy, most notably Sun finally open sourcing Java
- Oracle has tried to stiffle MySQLs advance by buying Sleepycat consequently to Innobase (providers of MySQL transaction engines) and approaching MySQL itself for an acquisition (though not a very dedicated one). Later this year it made a pretty spectacular move to become a Linux OS distributor itself by repacking Red Hat's product as "Linux unbreakable". Oracle: agressive, relentless, certainly not collaborative and community driven. IMO opinion they put themselves at risk to become another evil empire, which could seriously harm their leverage of Linux in the fight against MS SQL Server.
- Microsoft signed a Linux support deal with Novell, which left many breathless, but we were immediately brought back to reality when a brawl about patent infringements surfaced. Still, in June at the dUC, Ted Neward predicted that Microsoft will be the largest open source software company in 5 years, and I buy that (though, of course, it will never be called open source what they will be doing)
- The GPL v3 discussion between Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman has demonstrated that the industry now well distinguishes between mainstream and usually commercial open source as opposed to non-commercial free software
In general, things got a little more complex than in the early days, where there were clear cut distinctions between open source projects ("good") and proprietary vendors ("bad"), which now slowly disappear. Consequently, important open source advocates loose their edge (and/or drop the ball), incl. Red Hat and Novell, while the incumbent companies have become better at playing the game.
What I think is exciting, though, is that the real business fundamentals of open source now come to play. It's less the media buzz but whether you are able to attract a large and dedicated community, to create a strong ecosystem, and to run a viable business model that balances out the community stakes with commercial requirements in a win-win scenario.
I believe that open source start-ups have a better chance to do that because the cultural legacy of closed source companies will prevent many of them from embracing open source in its very core: the empowerment of users, even if at the short-term expense of the business.
db4objects has made enormous progress in 2006, having implemented its "Community 2.0" project, consisting of infrastructure investments (Wiki, integrated blogs, resource centers), openness (product forums, developer Skypecasts), increased user influence (survey, design discussions), contributions (ProjectSpaces, dVP), the first ever db4o User Conference (dUC), and lately the open source compatibility license dOCL. The core developer team has doubled its firepower and made enormous progress to deliver against relentless performance and usability requests from a user community double as large as before. All this has translated into great new customer relationships such as with Seagate, Intel, and Ricoh as well as a particularly strong growth in the strategically important Asia-Pacific region incl. China, Japan and India.
I want to thank all of those who have contributed to this success and look forward to another great year of cooperation to come!
Christof