April 29, 2013, Open source Business Conference, San Francisco—Jim Whitehurst from Red Hat talked about open source going into the mainstream and losing its niche status. The trends and drivers in the industry are coming from a newfound respect for the values of open source software.
The shifts start with technology and innovation. As a technology becomes a commodity, standards move to platforms, leading to more innovation. Some examples include big data and the cloud. Business benefits from these changes that are innovation related. The values are parallel to those from the technology side, from closed, proprietary systems to open and collaborative.
It's not just code, but whole areas of endeavor like education and business. The changes in structure enable micro-innovations and are user led. The increases in open innovation at scale are enabled by the new technologies. For example, github, crowd sourcing, and even American Idol, the ultimate real-time crowd-sourced data management platform where viewers choose the next artist.
IT users are moving to open source, with companies like Facebook, Google, and PayPal all depending entirely on open source tools and code for their operations. The availability of standard components enables a higher level of innovation that is user led. Open source has moved from existing functions like operating systems and databases to higher levels, and the resulting software is capable of running at speed and in a robust manner. Even the existing categories are getting faster innovation.
For example, MySQL and other early tools are getting faster and improving. One telling indicator is that some of the early tools are getting replaced by newer ones. Now, open source is leading in many technologies. The Web 2.0 communities are solving problems before the dedicated vendors are capable of solving. Red Hat has an eight-figure customer sharing innovations with them to get the solutions to the communities.
Many open source users are quite willing to give back programs to help the data center run better, and some equate their participation as a moral issue to solve and share. In many cases, the Web 2.0 world is turning around micro-innovations within a week.
The cloud demonstrates the parallel paradigm of changing technology and innovation leading to new architectures. Technology and innovation choices are interrelated. The innovation model for the next decade will be at the enterprise level and the choice is for open or closed systems. Open systems are user driven and have no clear roadmap for development. In comparison, closed systems are vendor controlled and have well defined roadmaps. The systems are stable and will add features and functions over time.
As a result, the industry must address the hypothesis of becoming open or die. The traditional methods are the wrong choice because they raise costs but are not measurable. The cloud is running on an open stack. If a company picks the wrong model, it is not the increase in costs that will matter, but the high probability that the company will fall behind on all technology.
The workloads will change in areas where innovation or IT department will be the choice. The CMO spends more than the CIO and the performance and functionality matter more in marketing than in IT. The issue is to have an internal or external model for innovation. The underlying infrastructure may rely on cool technology, but increasing the types and speed of innovation through open source and communities will out perform the hardware.