This week, the covers were lifted on North Bridge Venture Partner’s annual Future of Open Source survey. The results present a clear picture where pundits expect open source to make huge inroads as well as where proprietary software is likely to retain dominance. Other interesting insights came up. Here’s what the future of open source looks like.
Some background material: a panel of experts including luminaries from such well known companies and teams as Sun Microsystems, Ubuntu Linux, SugarCRM and the Ingres enterprise database met at Infoworld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) this week to discuss the future of open source, giving predictions regarding the types of companies which will drive the next wave of commercial open source successes.
Ubuntu, of course, need no introduction and the other companies are also well known such as Sun Microsystems who gave rise to many important UNIX technologies and are the new owners of MySQL. Representatives also participated from North Bridge Venture Partners – a venture-capital firm with $2.2b under management – and Acquia – perhaps best known for the product they support, Drupal, a popular web-based content management system (CMS.)
The North Bridge Venture Partners annually undertake their survey on the Future of Open Source. The results were presented at Infoworld’s 5th annual conference through the panel who then gave a wide-ranging discussion. This year OSBC was held in San Francisco over two days in late March.
Michael Skok, General Partner of North Bridge Venture Partners said “The highly visible commercial success of open source has helped firmly place it on the map as one of the most influential market segments within the software industry.”
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There were testy exchanges between the panelists about developer support for Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris.
The future of the operating system took center stage at the Open Source Business Conference here March 25, as a panel of vendor representatives debated the topic.
Dirk Hohndel, the chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel, said the company was totally driven by what the market wanted.
"If customers say they only want Microsoft's operating systems, it's not our business to question that. Now, that is not what customers are saying; they want options and there are more and more of these. Choice is both good and bad," he said.
James Hughes, a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems, said operating systems do nothing without applications. The choice of operating systems is done by developers on the basis of how long it takes them to get their job done using that system.
"So, the future of the operating system is to enable application developers to get their work done. They also want true and real support for their operating system, where someone actually answers the phone rather than just sending out e-mails to the community."
Roger Levy, the general manager of Novell's open platform solutions business group, agreed that customers choose their operating system based on what they feel they would get with it.
OSBC Panel Looks at the Future of the OS [2]