As my plane touched down yesterday, a thought hit me (given the nearly 18 hours on a plane, the fact that the thought struck me at that point may be telling... :-): perhaps the greatest customer value isn't in a license at all, or in software at all, but in the model that mostly obviates both: SaaS. Marc Benioff has been milking this theme for some time. I've said that there is no customer value in a product bei As my plane touched down yesterday, a thought hit me (given the nearly 18 hours on a plane, the fact that the thought struck me at that point may be telling… :-): perhaps the greatest customer value isn’t in a license at all, or in software at all, but in the model that mostly obviates both:SaaS.Marc Benioff has been milking this theme for some time. I’ve said that there is no customer value in a product being kept proprietary. I believe that to be true. But if we want to speak about pure customer value, it seems that SaaS might actually get us one step closer, because at that point the only thing that matters to the customer is value. They plug in, they get a service. It either meets their needs or it doesn’t. The question, of course, is what happens if it doesn’t. This is where open source provides value long after a customer has decided to leave a given project behind. If SaaS could be open in value, but also open data, then I think it just might trump the value offered in a license used to locally install software.There’s a great session on open source and SaaS at this year’s Open Source Business Conference. Open Source, SOA, and the Next-generation Data Center 05/23/2007, 3:00 PM – 3:50 PM Moderator: Michael Cote, Analyst, RedMonk. Speakers: Akash Garg, CTO, hi5 Networks. Dave Rosenberg, CEO and Co-Founder, MuleSource. Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, Chairman & CEO, WSO2. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the rage of the industry today. With the strong focus on open standards that promote interoperability, open source is extremely well poised to be the real secret sauce behind the SOA revolution. In this panel we will examine the impact of open source on SOA and how key open source infrastructure vendors are positioning their offerings to become the market leaders of the SOA platform. We’ll also hear from early adopter enterprises to hear how they view the open source & SOA opportunity. I don’t think they were planning to address this, but I’m planning to attend to pose the question, “What does an open source license look like in the SaaS world?”I think the answer to this question offers up a clue to the next decade of open source. It’s somewhat troubling that despite the crush to move software to the “cloud,” there are exactly ZERO open source licenses that follow it there. Someone want to help me write one? Open Source