tecosystems

Considering OSCON

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Welcome to OSCON

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

If asked to summarize last week’s OSCON conference in a couple of neat and tidy themes, I’d probably stall for a bit citing the difficulty of distilling such a vibrant and multi-faceted conference (Flickr set here) into a nicely packaged conclusion, but ultimately would offer two primary observations. First, that the open source world is becoming increasingly pragmatic, and second that less code, simplicity, call it what you will, is growing in importance as a design point.

The pragmatism would be obvious, I think, to any of the attendees. One need only look at the roster of vendors basing their business on open source to conclude that open source and financial remuneration are not mutually exclusive. This wasn’t always the case, of course, at least with a sizable portion of the open source population. But the past few years have illustrated to my satisfaction – and to the satisfaction of many developers I spoke with – that the participation of commercial entities in the community of open source can and usually is a good thing, provided that the firms in question understand that it’s a give and take – not just a take. Whether that means, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts it, that business is trumping technology I think is open to debate, but there’s no question that the business of open source is evolving, thanks to more pragmatism amongst the various community participants. Given my bias towards choice, I personally believe this to be a good thing. And to the purists that believe that open source should be first and foremost about the hacking, about freedom I’d say: not to worry, that aspect is alive and well. I sat next to Bryan and Wez as they did this, and I listened to Jeff’s session discussing Ubuntu as the embodiment of freedom. I defy anyone to tell me that these guys aren’t doing it for the love of it. As long there’s room for that, I have no problem with them making a few bucks in the process.

Even more interesting to me, however, was the fact that the lack of functional parity between open source products and their proprietary, commerical competitors is becoming less and less of a liability and more and more of an advantage worth trumpeting. Where Ryan’s lesscode.org and IBM’s Gluecode acquisition intersect is the realization that for many, the simplicity of some of the open source offerings is a virtue worth celebrating. Whether that’s with Geronimo, MySQL, PHP or Tomcat is ultimately irrelevant – what matters is that getting things done is easier. To be sure, the market of high end commercial products will likely always be there as high ends needs are likely to evolve; but just as surely, the high end market is not the only market. Too often representatives from the latter market talk about the former as nothing more than an on ramp. The implication being that everyone at some point will want and/or need to scale up to immense needs. I don’t agree with that notion at all; some might, but many are content with a less functional, but commensurately less complex stack. What open source has realized in the person of Firefox and countless other projects is that less features can actually be good, not bad, and that less code is often – if not always – the preferred approach. Some have difficulty with this concept: the expectation of one vendor I spoke with was that Mono would out of necessity become more and more bloated over time – my response was that this is exactly what those guys are positioned against, so I wouldn’t count on it. Open source does not have a monopoly on the principles of simple design, but I think its a deeply ingrained value in many of the projects I track.

I can’t say that every vendor or developer I spoke with reflected these two observations, but I do see them as fundamental to much of what I saw first hand last week, and expect to read about this week. I’d be interested to hear whether or not any of the other folks that were there saw things similarly or differently, and why. In any event, can’t wait to see what next year’s show brings.

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