Tim O'Reilly's much-honed The Open Source Paradigm Shift is an insightful articulation of the challenges that face not only Open Source and Free Software, but also proprietary sofware, in a world characterised by three key trends - Commoditisation, Collaboration and 'Customizability' (software-as-service).
He starts with the premise:
...that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits.
And then takes the reader on a whirlwind tour that includes the birth of Unix, the Internet, Usenet and the Web - as well as the latterday phenomena of Google, Amazon and eBay. Tim argues that to understand the future of Linux, for example, we should look to the history and development of the Internet, which has to an extent demonstrated "the nature of competitive advantage in the new paradigm".
He offers a particularly graphic example:
"How many of you use Linux?" I ask. Depending on the venue, 20-80% of the audience might raise its hands. "How many of you use Google?" Every hand in the room goes up. And the light begins to dawn. Every one of them uses Google's massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which "the software you use" is defined as the software running on the computer in front of you.Most of the "killer apps" of the Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people, run on Linux or FreeBSD. But the operating system, as formerly defined, is to these applications only a component of a larger system. Their true platform is the Internet.
A sometimes thought-provoking ("applications with people hidden inside them"?!) call to action, neatly balanced between the extremes of Open Source and proprietary approaches, from a man who - more than most - is in a position to know.
[Well worth following some of the links, too!]
Posted by lankyphil at July 1, 2004 11:31 PM | TrackBack