Paul Roberts of InfoWorld posted a very interesting blog entry last week on the open letter written by Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Linus Torvalds. As Schwartz notes, "Let's stop wasting time recreating wheels we both need to roll forward." In my opinion, organizations such as the Open Solutions Alliance hold the key. By uniting disparate communities with similar intentions it opens the door to further innovation and growth. The open source model, (however you want to define "model") appears to make the most sense strategically and financially.
In moving Solaris to open source, Schwartz makes a valuable point when he says, "Why does open sourcing take so long? Because we're starting from products that exist, in which a diversity of contributors and licensors/licensees have rights we have to negotiate." Going "open" with previously proprietary applications is anything but instantaneous. Avoiding intellectual property rights and license violations requires extensive due diligence and a rewrite of the business plan.
Companies such as Jaspersoft who made the shift from proprietary to open source a couple years back, revamped their business model. It was no small feat and it didn't happen overnight. In fact, it wasn't even on the roadmap five short years ago. However, the more prevalent trend is definitely companies going from proprietary to open source with specific products (such as Solaris). Take for instance Adobe, who released source code for Adobe Flex as open source to fuel collaboration and growth. Oracle did the same when they donated 80 Ajax components to Apache. There are numerous examples and data points that show the snowball effect. Who knows the actual intent behind moves like these but is that really the point? I often wonder if these actions are really about innovation for the community's sake, or about capturing free labor, expertise, and intellect. Again, is that really the point? The point is that open source is more mainstream every day.
The open source community is fractured and full of factions, which seems to fly in the face of why the open source movement started in the first place. So the shift from proprietary to open source seems like paving the way for progress any way you look at it. Only time, developer contributions, and market acceptance will tell.
-Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale
