Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back at Open Source in 2005
bhmit1 writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on the open source progress in 2005. Their conclusion: "in 2005, the software movement finally gained traction in Corporate America and saw a new influx of VC cash." Has the shift in corporate america really occurred or are activities like the profitability of Red Hat signalling that the CEO's are still holding on to the old way of business?"
With open source software businesses will be able to save money. Needless to say these cost savings will be passed on to the consumer.
sudo mod me up
Old way of business = profit. New way of business = ???
Seriously that doesn't make sense. Surely Red Hat's profitability indicates that they have a handle on the new way of doing business.
Ah, this definitely was the year of desktop Linux and the death of *BSD, the year in which I welcome Linus, our new KDE-loving overlord... Imagine a beowulf cluster of KDE-loving Linuses!
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
The market is still dubious about open source and for good reason. The big players, the ones pushing around 400 billion dollars, still control the legal avenues and we've seen that the legal avenues are being used in many ways to hedge out the OSS players. If $400 million in VC was invested in OSS startups then it really was venture capital in the truest sense of the term.
I'm happy to see OSS getting a foot in the door but I'm not going to break out the champagne and glasses until we see some real reform on both the business and political fronts.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
IBM learned long ago that ongoing support generates a constant revenue stream.
That lesson was not lost on Novell, Redhat and I believe Ubuntu is following the same path
I think that we will see the application services and support companies running up the revenue stream. However, it takes talented people to seed this activity; one with a proven track record. I have been told that a VC looks briefly at the business plan, just to see it is thorough, knowing full well that as soon as the business opens it's doors, that plan will change as the prime movers identify the hot market needs.
So the quality of the people in the enterprise, and their successes is what gathers the most attention from the VC. It is the people that will make or break the business.
This is progress?
Has the shift in corporate america really occurred or are activities like the profitability of Red Hat signalling that the CEO's are still holding on to the old way of business?
The reason why open source vendors who act more like "real" companies do well is because corporate IT absolutely demands that they have someone to complain to when everything goes to hell. Imagine you're the CIO of a 25,000 person company who depends on its IT systems to make money. I think you'd be foolish to trust that the crew of experts you hired is going to stick around, and be able to solve any problem that comes up. Sooner or later, something high-profile will die. Who do you call??
Companies like Red Hat enforce standards in an open source world that really doesn't have very many. They sell RHEL with the promise that you'll get tech support as long as you use their packages and software. That's a compelling argument. One thing I've been impressed with is commercial vendors' ability to call in massive amounts of help when a real emergency occurs. Red Hat, Novell, etc. are capable of that. Even if you have a support agreement with the makers of fooPackage, which happens to be the crucial link in your business process, can they guarantee that they'll work with you as long as it takes to solve a problem. Worse yet, let's say it's a multi-level problem between fooPackage, barPackage and blahPackage. Now you've got "dualing vendors" on your hands all saying "it's not our problem." Not that that doesn't happen in the commercial world, but a commercial OS vendor (Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) is helpful in mediating those fights.
The Red Hats and the Novells are going to be the ones who finally get a Linux desktop on the market. That's because they'll pick one office suite, tweak the hell out of it, and make it a standard akin to MS Office. Companies want to know that their training dollars aren't going to be wasted. Most users learn one software package to do their jobs, memorize the commands, and will not readily learn anything new. That's what the Linux desktop is up against.
Its a pain that I cannot recommend Linux as an operating system into many of our customers corporate environments simply because the vendor support is still not there. Here is a classic example of issues that I have faced with Linux over the last year. Recommending a customer to go with Linux would have required them to use GFS to keep it supported by Redhat, however there is no Veritas or Legato backup agent for GFS at this point in time which means they would have had issues backing up the file systems or having a system that would have been completely un supported. So we ended up recommending Solaris 10 with Veritas Cluster Server which we knew we could backup using the Legato or Veritas backup software and remain fully supported. The real issue is not that we cant support the product in house but its who does management call when things break which from my experience does not happen too often in a well designed and implemented solution. For linux to really be accepted on a broad scale enterprise offering it must have
- Fully supported file systems with fully supported backup agents for each system.
- Vender interoperability. Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 and Enterprise Linux 4. Some commercial applications will not work properly on 4 but will on 3 because of the compiler/libraries they had used to build the code.
As an open source advocate and someone who believes in the principals of open source things have come a very long way over the last year, but the real linch pins still remain and will remain for some time.
But what about new stuff? Will someone with a really innovative idea open source it from the beginning? And even worse: will we notice?
I do admit that open source projects have features that commercial projects never bothered to implement (image dumps from video files in VideoLan comes to mind) but I struggle to find something completely new.
Office suites are a bad idea. MS Office is proof of that; it's the best product in its category, but it still really really sucks.
I hate comparisons like this. They are so useless. It's like saying the Babylonians were the best mathematicians in their day, but they were really, really stupid. Or the Germans were the best physicists in their day, but they were really, really bad at physics.
You can gain no insight whatsoever with such a statement.
I think it was a very good year for Open Source software.
In 2005, my work projects benefited highly from open source libraries. My testing software would have been very time-consuming to write without open source software. In general, it has saved me quite a bit of time and aggravation.
In addition, each time I proposed open source as a means of supplying something I needed to use, I didn't need to justify it to the project management types - they understand the power and the value now...
Perhaps a sea change is occurring that makes it a little more understandable (to corporate types) that the volunteer work of a few benefits the many.
A big thanks to those who have burned the midnight oil just to provide software for the rest of the world!
A Passionate Independent Musician
What the hell does this mean? Are you saying the "new" way of doing business means not achieving profitability?
It means that corporate america seems to be saying "open source is great, where do we buy it" instead of considering how to adjust their business to better utilize OSS. They seem to be jumping on the latest buzzword or trend without really understanding the value. And the boom of Red Hat seems to be indicating that people are buying OSS rather than buying into the OSS concept. Phrasing it to avoid "shouldn't Red Hat want to make a profit" confusion would have taken a few more brain cells working than I had before the morning sugar rush, sorry.