State of Open Source

I don’t know if I’m any more qualified to comment on the state of open source than anyone else out there, but I did put some commentary together for InfoWorld’s open source roundtable article series last week. Those comments got spread out over several different themed InfoWorld articles along with commentaries by other open source folks including Matt Asay, Bruce Perens, Chris DiBona of Google and others.

However, if you want to read rhw interviews in their original Q&A format, that’s been published as a series of articles at ComputerWorld. So instead of reading the comments as thematically grouped by the InfoWorld editors, you can read the specific interviews if you prefer. (Ok, searching the ComputerWorld site is not particularly easy, so you may be better off just using the links to comments by me, Matt Asay, Chris DiBona, Bruce Perens, etc.)

I give my view on some of the challenges & opportunities facing open source, where open source is heading over the next five years, trends in commercialization as well as some of the lessons learned and surprises along the way.

The most important next step is the emergence of what I call “Enterprise 2.0.” It’s time for mainstream corporate IT departments to look at the best practices happening in the Web area and determine how to make their own infrastructure and applications more Web-based. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Travelocity are all running open source stacks meeting huge demands of their users for high availability, performance, scalability, and security. These are the same things that corporate IT needs. So I think there are lessons to be learned in making corporate IT more nimble and more cost-effective using open source software.