OSCON 2008 - Chaos, Business Models And Open Source Movies

OSCON is now into its 3rd day. xTuple is exhibiting (Booth #219, in case you are lucky enough to attend) and Openbravo’s Chief Products Officer, Paolo Juvara, is also attending and will be blogging on Openbravo’s site.

One of the more interesting sessions was sponsored by Microsoft, of all companies. The panel discussed general open source issues, with panel members from MySQl, Microsoft, O’Reilly Radar and Science Commons.

Order In The Chaos Of Open Source Projects

One of the questions raised was quite surprising-’what surprised you about open source’. One of the panelist,Siobhan O’Mahony, who has a background in social studies, answered brilliantly - she was surprised at how well very large open source projects are managed. I never thought of it that way. It’s truly amazing how people can collaborate on a global scale, with no funding, no formal obligation to spend time on the project, and still produce a high quality product. And although many of the projects start as a de-centralized, P2P kind of effort, as projects evolve, a core team of leaders emerges. This is happening in the most natural way, without any board meetings or stakeholder demands. Evolution at its best.

That leading core provides the energy required to decrease the level of entropy (remember the second law of thermodynamics?) in the project. That is a kind of energy you can’t buy. It’s just there, because that’s what open source is all about. And that’s why so many open source project are successful.

The Hybrid Model

Another issue that was discussed was the hybrid open source model which is becoming very popular,especially for open source business software. MySQL is probably the best example of the model’s success. Their database software is hugely popular (the words you read now are stored on their database), and they were smart enough to build a viable business model. It was so viable,actually, that Sun acquired them for 1B$. The hybrid model is the future of open source, particularly for the enterprise, as noted by the panel. Most open source ERP vendors already realized the strength of the model and are adopting different variations of it.

Open Source Content

Another interesting subject was raised by Jon Wilbanks- open software code vs. open content. When you talk about open source, you imagine a group of hardcore programmers, sitting late at night,drinking tons of coffee and churning out amazing pieces of software code. But the open source movement did not only change how software is written-it is now influencing content.

And content is BIG. Think about all the images, videos,music,news articles, scientific research, even marketing lists, produced every day. Think of them in open source terms. Imagine an open source movie, with a quality equivalent to the Apache project, or Eclipse. Everyone volunteers - actors,producers, directors, PR guys. The movie is edited by the masses. You can download the movie for free, edit it any way you like, redistribute it. It’s a whole new way of thinking about content. I bet a hybrid model will evolve around content creation as well.

If only I knew who is going to be the ‘MySQL of Content’, I’d be the first member to join that community!