Future of Open Source [panel]
March 25th, 2008 by HenPanel of people with big thoughts on the future of our beloved open world. Roger Burkhardt (Ingres), MySQL (Zach Urloff stood in for the ill Marten Mickos), John Roberts (SugarCRM), Jeff Whatcott (Acquia (Drupal company)) and Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu). Chaired by Michael Skok.
A somewhat interesting session, it went over the survey from before the conference and asked the panelists if they agreed with those surveyed. Very good way to model a panel session. I remember Mark Shuttleworth speaking at ApacheCon and not being very impressed simply because his focus (Linux/Desktops) was not a good fit for our general focus. Mark was very impressive on this panel - his comments were at the right time, applied to the right place etc, and always very good.
Of course there were bits I disagreed with - one day it would be interesting to do one of these panel things where I would feel the urge to get up there and speak my mind. Generally too English (polite… timid… quiet… whatever) to argue with them.
One of my disagreements is on a question as to whether Open Source is:
a) Business Model
b) Marketing Model
c) Development Model
d) All of the above
e) None of the above
The true answer is f) Community model. Wikipedia is a great Open Source success story. a), b) and c) are all true when you realize they are on top of a community model. As someone at lunch pointed out - very Cathedral & Bazaar; or Cluetrain as I pointed out. Open Source is a business model in that it’s a community model, communities are about conversations, and business is at the end of the day about a conversation in which defined value is exchanged.
While talking about the effect of Open Source on the economy, a very good point from the Jeff Whatcott - “Absence of money is a bigger push for innovation than lots of money”.
A couple of t-shirt ideas:
* “Open Source is People”
* “Open Source was Social 1.0″ (or maybe 1.5?)
Mark Shuttleworth asked a good question. Have we reached the IBM point yet? Is Open Source usage the default answer now and you have to justify not choosing that? Opinion was divided on whether we’ve reached that yet.