The "First Ever Think Tank Report on the Future of Commercial Open Source"

[Posted March 1, 2006 by corbet]

SDForum and the Olliance Group have announced the availability of a report from an "open source think tank" event held in January. This group got together and came up with a number of not entirely earth-shaking conclusions. "There are not enough developers to participate in all the open source communities. With too many projects and not enough focus on key projects -- there is simply not enough talent to mature open source fast enough." The Olliance site requires registration to obtain the report, but said report is under the Creative Commons Attribution license. So you can also get a copy from LWN [PDF].

The "First Ever Think Tank Report on the Future of Commercial Open Source"

Posted Mar 1, 2006 17:02 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

An excellent read.
Binary-only drivers didn't appear to crop up, at a casual glance.
I did see this, though, and wished for more elaboration:

Group #5 question: Imagine it is the year 2010, what were the key issues surrounding commercial open source licensing over the past 5 years? How has the community of commercial open source providers and
their customers resolved these issues?
...
-- By 2010, the patent issue was solved. The "patent trolls" overreached. This caused a reduction in the value of software licenses

Neat!

Posted Mar 1, 2006 18:31 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

The conclusions may not be "earth-shattering", but the fact that this is available is a GOOD THING. It's hard to make good decisions without having people analyze what is happening and where things are likely to go... and by having many viewpoints, you're less likely to miss a critical influence. I suspect more of these kinds of reports will be released in the future, and that's a good thing.

Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 1, 2006 18:51 UTC (Wed) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link] (2 responses)

"At this point, the panelists were asked what advice they could offer to 'real' open source companies (most of this conversation centered around Red Hat)?"

"Tim O'Reilly advised Red Hat that they must know what business they are in and that their mentor should be Dell as integration is the heart of their business. Rod Smith agreed that integration/certification is Red Hat's primary value. They've not embraced 'letting go'. It has less to do with open source and more to do with focusing on your customers and building value you can actually deliver. If you are too religious about anything, you're not serving your customers or your business. Finally, Tim O'Reilly cautioned Red Hat to 'watch their data'. Often, the value lies in the data associated with the software and not the software itself. If you don't protect that data, someone drafting behind you could build a business designed to take the profits that should have been yours."

Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 2, 2006 0:14 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

So essentially Tim O'Reilly advised Red Hat to pull out of the community and concentrate completely on integrating and distributing existing technologies as cheaply as possible on a massive scale (Dell, after all, has a very small R&D budget). If I was a Red Hat shareholder I might like that plan, but as a free software person it worries me a bit.

Quote about RedHat's focus

Posted Mar 2, 2006 3:00 UTC (Thu) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link]

The trouble is that there is a critical difference between DELL and RedHat:

Both are essentially value-add integrators of other's innovations/R&D/Development

BUT:

Dell's "other" is Intel,AMD,via,Nvidia,Samsung,Micron,Hitachi,Maxtor, etc...

RedHat's "others" is jRandom opensource developer. (Not flame bait, I am not saying that is a bad thing or that jRandom developer is not every bit as capable if not more than those companies....)

Dell's suppliers are beholden to $'s and respond very well to the specific needs of a large customer like Dell. Dell gets what it needs to maximize profits for Dell.

RedHat's suppliers are beholden to a much more ephemeral "market pressure" of "what is popular amonst open source developers". If RedHat _needs_ something specific, it has a vested interest in "fostering" the community effort (or just doing it themsleves) to ensure that something (that would otherwise prove unintersting to those of us without "enterprise" hardware to run) gets done.

So, RedHat can never be as "hands off" as Dell and still get what it needs. RedHat's profit margin comes from a relatively (relative to random linux users), small market of enterprise users who have specific needs that often don't match up with what the broader user-base of linux needs.

This points out the issue I keep running into with the binary (as in black/white) open vs proprietary software argument which is that the answer is somewhere in between.

There are those applications which apply to the broader user-base where opensource works very well and then there are those applications which are only of interest to a small community where time and expertise are not sufficiently distributed to support "the bazzare". In fact there are applications like the "Operating System" which have become too large for one company to effectively steward... it NEEDS a community.

Even those "niche" applications eventually become sufficiently well understood at some point that it does not take a large community to support it, but that is long after the "innovation" phase of that solution has passed... So, the proprietary app transitions from innovation to commodity and the "best" support model changes with it...

All that said, I understand that humans are far better at changing through revolution than evolution, so RMS cannot afford to be pragmatic...