I just finished presenting at the COSS.fi Verso open source program, and received a lot of useful feedback (both today and over dinner last night with Matti, Petri, Mikko, and Stephe Walli). I was discussing how difficult it was for proprietary vendors to move forward with open source precisely because of their past proprietary successes. Petri Rasanen then asked,"But which boats should one burn?"Should Novell j I just finished presenting at the COSS.fi Verso open source program, and received a lot of useful feedback (both today and over dinner last night with Matti, Petri, Mikko, and Stephe Walli). I was discussing how difficult it was for proprietary vendors to move forward with open source precisely because of their past proprietary successes. Petri Rasanen then asked,“But which boats should one burn?”Should Novell jettison GroupWise? (Yes, IMHO.) Should Microsoft open source Windows? What about IBM and WebSphere? Etc. These are non-trivial questions, with billions of dollars at stake. If you burn your boats, giving away all the software under the GPL or BSD/Apache, what happens if you burn all your value and go out of business? (I would argue that this simply requires a company to rethink where to deliver value – taking the paid value out of the software itself and putting it elsewhere – but it’s a thorny issue.) Or what happens if you burn the boat while you’re actually out at sea, as it were, and leave yourself with no way to make land (either to go backward or forward)?As one audience member suggested, many proprietary companies routinely “burn their boats” in the form of legacy products that they jettison, leaving their customers with the scorched hulls of the ships (and a tenuous path forward). Open source would at least expand options for these customers, as Microsoft has with FoxPro. IBM uses Apache/BSD to burn boats…everyone else’s. 🙂 The company builds its software business on proprietary software and its services and hardware businesses on open source software (as well as its proprietary software.) This is classic Martin Fink-type thinking, i.e., open source your complements which also happen to be your competitors’ core competencies. The problem is, they’ll likely do the same. Or, more pertinently, an open source competitor will come along that doesn’t have the same need to keep sacred any proprietary software. How do you compete with someone that can drive all software value to $0.00? Anyway, no answers out of this one, but a lot of questions. Net net: burning the boats is the right thing to do, but which boats to burn…? That is a non-trivial question. Open Source