What's The Drupal Community View on the Future of Open Source?
Next week at the Open Source Business Conference I’m going to be joining a panel discussion put together by Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture Partners. The panel includes Roger Burkhardt of Ingres, Mårten Mickos of MySQL AB, John Roberts of SugarCRM, and Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical/Ubuntu.
The panel will be discussing key trends in open source software centered on the results of a short online survey of OSBC attendees and members of key open source communities. I want to make sure we get a good sample from the Drupal community, so I’m posting the link to the Acquia version of the survey below.
(The survey is now closed. I’ll link to the results as soon as they are released.)
The survey addresses the motivations for selecting open source, open source industry dynamics, and asks respondents to make predictions about how open source will unfold. It’s mostly tuned to the interests of OSBC attendees, but I’m sure many in the Drupal community will find it intriguing as well. I’ll be sure to blog the results of the survey and the panel discussion here, so stay tuned.
Jeff, the link doesn’t seem to be working. Can anyone else confirm?
Hmmm. I just tested it and it seems to be operating.
As with previous surveys of this nature, I found the premises behind most of the questions bewildering.
For example, I couldn't understand the assumption that Red Hat was the paradigmatic Open Source company, and that any business that did well our of Open Source/Free Software was therefore going to be "the next Red Hat". Red Hat made it's fortune making free software look more familiar to corporate IT departments. There's little or no need for this service any more. The idea that there is any money to be made in selling shrink-wrapped boxes and something that looks like a per-seat license to use free software is a bit strange.
In general just the idea that companies drive the free software/open source economy seems odd coming from anybody with experience with Drupal. Drupal demonstrates quite vividly that the success or failure of free software projects depends on communities, not companies. Companies can (and should) be part of the community, but the project has to stand on it's own feet. A prerequisite for the success of OpenOffice.org will be Sun becoming one of many contributors instead of possessing a controlling interest, likewise Ubuntu and Canonical. Red Hat's a bit of a dinosaur. The fact that nobody else is still making make money from that model (anybody remember Mandrake/Mandriva?) is strongly suggestive that's it's day has passed.
I think the question you are referring to was using Red Hat as an example of an independent publicly traded company with a relatively large revenue stream on open source. There aren’t too many of of those out there at the moment.
I agree that Red Hat may not be “the” model for all open source software companies to follow. You bring up some great points about broad-based community participation being a key indicator of project health.
But regardless of how they got here, and regardless of what we may think of their future prospects, Red Hat is here today with a $400,000,000 annual revenue business built on open source. That’s a real benchmark in my book.
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