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April 09, 2005
The Vendorization of Open Source
I've tried to come up with a summary of what I saw at OSBC and I guess the title is as close as it gets. Open Source in business is becoming more and more about the vendors. Obviously this has been true with Open Source projects like MySQL and JBoss for a while now, but things are changing. Vendors are becoming highly visible for other Open Source offerings such as lesser-known projects (Funambol) or bundles of Open Source components (SpikeSource) or services and solutions around Open Source (Optaros).
Times have certainly changed from when I first started in Open Source business and it was a (nice) fight convincing the Open Source community that - even though you were a commercial entity - you were still prepared to support the community and "get involved". I still think getting involved (rolling up your sleeves) is important to becoming accepted in the Open Source projects - but it's obvious that there is now another level to Open Source commercialism.
On the one hand this is probably a good thing as plenty of corporations will base their acceptance of Open Source on their being these types of commercial entities ("to choke"). But on the other hand I doubt whether the involvement in Open Source projects will rise in proportion to the number of companies coming onto the market.
And this, in the long run, could cause major friction between the Open Source communities on the one side and the vendors on the other.
Posted by Matthew at April 9, 2005 05:31 PM