Next week I'm on a panel at the WSA Investment Forum 2005. The panel will discuss software platforms, but it's really to discuss OSS vs MS.
I'm MS. I feel al little like a human in Animal Farm. The moderator asked for "themes and questions." Ive laid out mine below (thanks to a lot of insight from Sam Ramji at MSFT).
As far as I know, I am the only panelist who has disclosed this. However, that may confer little advantage on the other panelists. Colleagues assure me my blog's obscuruty is as hard to penetrate as triple-DES encryption, and cheaper to implement.
Themes (representing my view)
-- It seems there’s a hype around Open Source. Hype in those who see it as a brave new world of “free” software; hype in those (esp MS) who have reacted with everything from sneers to threats.
-- Pundits have analogized OSS with the notion of the “commons.” It’s not a bad analogy. We all recognize the value of a commons (or a national park), but it endures in a constant state of tension which guarantees both its existence and its boundaries. In this analogy the OSS fans are the Sierra club and MS is Weyerhauser (and homebuilders, and homeowners?)
-- why isn’t OSS similarly stimulated and limited?
-- stimulated by the OSS-ization of certain software stacks in certain domains. Like LAMP in hosted environments, where control and access trump support and standardization.
-- limited by the demands for familiarity, volume network effects, and accountability. Like Windows (or, for that matter, RedHat-supported Linux, or Z-OS) in the Ford data center.
Questions (for the panel):
1) Is it “OSS or be damned" for all software? Open Source technologies run well on Windows, and SQL Server is a better fit for the economic tolerances of OSS users than Oracle. Why start with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP when evidence shows Windows + AMP can scale more cheaply?
2) Does OSS value have limits or sweetspots, or is OSS always best?
• It’s convincingly argued that OSS community development is a good model for development of technologies that are restricted to internet-only environments – blogs, wikis, etc. – but do the OSS economics work equally for specific devices: Phones, PCs, PDAs?
• The values of OSS is largely accepted for ISVs producing web-centric hosted products, who maintain their own installations, How does OSS benefit corporations who don’t want to be in that business – and for whom touching the source code will invalidate their support license? See this quote from a former Linux exec. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/35149.html
He noted that customers of Red Hat and Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) are given a set of binaries, but do not get source code. "If you want to touch the code, then your support model breaks," he said. Other companies that do allow for source-code manipulation are in the business of delivering customized products.
I'll let you know how it goes.
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