Thursday, February 7, 2008

Open Source Think Tank - Part One of Many

The 3rd Annual Open Source Think Tank on February 7-9 at the Silverado Resort, Napa Valley, Calif. is themed “The Future of Commercial Open Source”. Andrew Aitken, CEO of Olliance, kicked-off the opening remarks with some trends from his personal pov:

  • Balkanization” – the availability of open source is more fragmented today. Used to be SourceForge was the one site to go; now there are “clumps of communities not tied together”.
  • Scarcity of Resources – tremendous demand for business and technical personnel. Can impact the adoption of OSS.
  • Growing Complexity – numerous open source projects, proprietary software moving into OSS, etc. Not changing for the foreseeable future.
  • Consolidation – will increase over the next few years. Larry Augustan thinks that there will be 30-50 deals per year. Ave large deals: $300m. Many small deals.

Andrew concludes that "the future is Open Source", at least over the next few years, and it will become a standard part of the computing environment and way business is done.

1 comment:

Roberto Galoppini said...

Hi Doug,

the Open Source started to experience the power of the so called Group Forming Networks (GFN), and I definitely see it as a plus. More on this as soon as I´ll be back home, greetings from the Frankfurt airport! ;-)