I am trying to get out of the office to get home and see my wife and son. I really am.
But then clients keep calling and want to talk about issues worth thousands of dollars. And I needed to catch up with Stepho-he’s been going nuts travelwise these last few weeks, doing a great job, cranking it with the clients, building the community, working with people to make good things happen. I am continually impressed by just how smart and friendly and just plain good Stephen is – the combination of technical chops he’s modest about with an ability to pop up to 30,000 feet in an instant, like Google Earth, is.. worth a lot.
We recently hired Cote. And it seems we have got a keeper. They guy is already really cranking it.
I read a lot of stuff about open source. I talk to tons of people about open source, closed source, business models, and what Cote calls Taking Care of Business (TCB).
I mean I read a LOT of stuff and talk to a ton of smart people on the subject. As an industry analyst I am in the extremely privileged position of having some people out there whose job it is, partly at least–you know who are, take a bow AR teams of the world–to help me talk to smart people that can do things that will change a market.
Of course in open source I can talk to pretty much anyone, provided I am polite and not seen as an emmisary of Satan for working with Big Vendors. But there are certain advantages to having a lot of money to spend on evangelism in all its forms. AR is one such – outreach.
We’re not just about big vendors though – far from it. I am very proud-and much of the credit must go to Stephen- that RedMonk has so many clients with open source at the core of their business. These companies don’t have a ton of money to spend so they put it where it counts. Thanks, clients!
So when I was trying to get out of the office, and I saw this post by Cote- I thought bank it. Go home. Go grab the train and get gone. But I kept reading. Cote is an even better writer than I realised. I recently got an email from someone that Cote had worked for, and he described him as a leader. I can see why – Cote has a very humanist perspective, People Over Proces, geddit, which is very appealing. But he can also do cynical where necessary, which is essential in this business.
I am chuffed that RedMonk has just brought in another sharp mind on the issue that will most define the industry, and perhaps the world economy, for years to come: open source.
Vinnie would probably say I should include the rise of India as a software and services powerhouse in any analysis of the new financial realities facing the software industry. Good point. But in some respects, I believe, the phenomenon of outsourcing will be accelerated to its natural conclusion by OSS. Iti s the defining factor economically speaking. Both OSS and the new world centers of gravity, heavy with people, are flatteners in Friedman’s terms, but as Cote says it is about the people. Show me the money. Indians aren’t cheap. They are valuable. Value is something you pay for. Small teams with low overheads can do great work and live comfortable lives, anywhere in the world.
Open source is now the environment in which every vendor in the industry competes, Microsoft included. I suggest you go over and read a sharp analysis disguised as an IBM conference roundup..
I disagree that open and closed source are so different. The great convergence is well underway. Microsoft, for example, is already a commercial and open source software supplier. It just hasn’t fully realised it yet. Google uses open source but I hear it has not-invented-here disease on those rough patches on its elbows. Eclipse is becoming one of the most important software suppliers in the industry…with ludicrously small overheads. Convergence.
But that’s some solid gonzo analysis, Cote, thanks. I am so late..
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Sorry I didn’t hyperlink to everyone and call out individuals and companies. Maybe I will follow up next week but I was trying to get out of the office.
Eclipse, IBM, and Microsoft are RedMonk clients.
Cote' says:
March 3, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Ah, shucks: you’re too kind ;>
Reflecting on it, for the practitioner, I don’t think open source and closed source are different. As I mentioned in today’s follow up post, open source now-a-days is like breathing: it’s the normal state of things.
That said, there very much is are groups of people you can call “closed source thinkers” and “open source thinkers.” The catch is that the first group is just slower to realize how much things have already changed and how much more things are going to change. The shift is subtle to kool-aid drinkers like us, but my gut tells me that it’s going to be dramatic once it takes hold: like the move from a 56k dial-up to an always on broadband connection.
To put it another way, as you said, “[they] just hasn’t fully realised it yet.” That full realization will open all sorts of doors for change, and it’ll be fascinating to see who goes through which doors. For example, in an open source world, all your coders don’t need to work for the same company. Imagine how different things would be if MS Office was coded by MSFT’ers and non-MSFT’s alike. Or Vista. What if Linus was a core member of the Windows team?
Those kinds of things are just subtle mental shifts — “oh, all those people can be partners instead of enemies” — but they have big consequences. I’m dying for the day when “The Big Baddies” (from a pure OSS perspective, not mine) invite people like Fleury, Stallman, Linus, Miguel, &co. to come to their company and say to them, “OK, have at it. Here’s cash and people. Now what?”
There’s plenty — P-L-E-N-T-Y, plenty! — to be cynical about that line of thinking, but it’s a good pile of goo to start flinging around to see what sticks. And like you were saying about Ellison and Fleury, I’d *pay* to see that.
vinnie mirchandani says:
March 4, 2006 at 12:09 am
James, India is actually getting expensive. I am equally excited and on my blog write about Rural sourcing, automation of systems management and integration, cheap broadband, cheap storage, SaaS, results based on-line advertising, x86 chips and Open source – with all hardwrae/software/services/telecom building blocks so much cheaper than 5 years ago, vendors who take advantage of and pass along this deflationary trend are poised to do better than those who hand on to old paradigms…it is a great time to be in tech. I better take my wife out to dinner, too..cheers
stephen o'grady says:
March 6, 2006 at 4:20 pm
too kind indeed š
plus, we need to recall who’s driving the most traffic and some of the better conversations these days. it ain’t me š