I’m reading an otherwise unremarkable book by Kevin Phillips titled American Theocracy, and I’m struck by a phrase he uses, “Yesteryear’s Success,” where, speaking about world economic powers, he writes, “The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky, successes eventually became economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens.” I wish I could have so articulately described the quirky success of n I’m reading an otherwise unremarkable book by Kevin Phillips titled American Theocracy, and I’m struck by a phrase he uses, “Yesteryear’s Success,” where, speaking about world economic powers, he writes, “The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky, successes eventually became economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens.”I wish I could have so articulately described the quirky success of not world economic powers but of Microsoft. I can’t imagine anything much quirkier than Microsoft and the path they trod to become a huge monopoly. What’s more interesting is the seemingly confused strategy they’re attempting to implement and follow today.These “economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens” haunt not only the vendors but also the consumers. In fact, the consumers are put at an even larger disadvantage having done continuous business with these dinosaurs. I remember when I was at Ingres and visiting one of our potential large-scale customers. In the initial meeting the head of procurement was there. I thought this odd for a meeting about technology and innovation until I heard their questions: “What is a CPU?” “How do you count multi-core CPUs?” “What if I pay for licenses that I no longer wish to deploy?” I realized that the questions I was hearing were representative of the economic obstacle courses the consumer faced in dealing with their then-current software vendor. This was an eye-opening meeting for me. Before we were permitted to present technology to the technologists of this company we had to explain licensing terms to their procurement office.How did we get ourselves into a situation where innovation within a company is hampered by the obstacle course created by an unrelated vendor? Companies like Oracle and Microsoft speak about the economies they’ve created. It’s true; these companies have created huge economies that have resulted in untold numbers of jobs being created and huge amounts of realized efficiency. At what point, however, does that economy no longer represent improved efficiency but, rather, increased drag? I believe that we’re reaching another tipping point where it is less efficient to do business with the large closed-source vendors. These vendors continue to create ever more complex business models and more convoluted reasoning on why they should be the vendor of choice in order to sustain yesteryear’s successes. I want to be part of tomorrow’s successes and the smaller, nimbler open-source companies will help bring about this needed change. For how much longer will we continue to pay the taxes, both overt and covert, imposed by the closed-source vendors and their inefficient methods? Open Source