Attended a talk yesterday on open source and open standards by Dr. Bob Sutor who is the VP of standards and open source at IBM. He is evangelizing open source and open standards in a pretty big way. Open source is one of those often discussed and debated topics all the time and hence I was not very enthused to pay good attention to this talk. But interestingly the talk was very refreshing. Bob presented what could be a very techically and drab topic in a easy to understand way for a non technical audience.
Some of the salient points of the talk were
- Open standard: A standard is a blueprint. How things are built and talk to each other,which should by no means be closed. Open for standard means development, maintaineance, accession and implementation and modification is done in transparent way.
- Open source: It is code which is built in a colloborative way by a community. It could be **free** and may or may not implement open standard.
- Open source and open standards leads to tremendous amount of value creation.
- Consumer are becoming smarter and smarter, they don’t trust software companies for ex when companies say “we will take care of your security” or “you need these new features”
- For governments it is highly important that they follow open standards, data/information generated by an individual is something that belongs to him but the data created by governments is a public good.
- There are various different Business Models that can be used to build open source companies
- Support
- Maintaineance
- Services
- Patronage
- Open source should not be done just for the heck of it, many players in the industry have observed that open source creates tremendous amount of value but a firms decision to go do open source should be aligned to its business and strategic objectives.
- Open source will not happen in just one single day, it will take a long time for a majority of things to become open.
The talk had a lot of strategic insights embedded in it but explained in a lucid way 🙂
- Open standards should be followed because they add value through economies of scale to all the players in the value chain.
- It’s been proven beyond doubt that open source leads to tremendous amount of value creation. Software companies who gets this and play their cards leveraging it will stand benefit in the very long run. Few smart folks in IBM have realized this and thus IBM has invested heavily in open source. Thus open source is not just about geekery but its about economic value creation.
- No one(especially the corporates) should be given the right to impose exclusivity to government created information. If a vendor uses properietary format it is essentially imposing an exclusivity those making the good non-public.
- Value creation is undoubted in open source but how is a lion’s share of this value getting capture for the person who coordinated this value creation is an not well solved equation as of now. Couple of methods mentioned above (viz business models) are not very compelling so many are figuring out viable business models in open source. [ One easy & successful but extremely myopic option that comes to mind immediately is for one to build a Gluecode and sell it to IBM 🙂 ]
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