Mission Creek

Last Thursday I attended the SDForum re-launch of the Open Source Software SIG. For those of you who don’t know, SDForum (Software Developer Forum) is a Silicon Valley not-for-profit organization providing an unbiased source of information and insight to the technology community for the past 23 years. SDForum provides a venue for engineers, executives, researchers, technology leaders, and venture capitalists to exchange information on emerging technologies and best practices.

The Open Source SIG (Special Interest Group) was re-launched after a few month hiatus. The speaker panel included Mark Brewer, CEO Covalent, Munwar Shariff, COO Cignex, Roy Singham, Thoughtworks, and was moderated by Andrew Aitken, Managing Director, The Olliance Group.

Here are some of the top themes that emerged from this meeting:

• The question for Fortune 1000 companies is not if they will integrate open source into their systems, it is a question of how it will work with their legacy systems.
• Open Source used to be driven by technologists, now business units are demanding because of the cost savings provided by open source software as compared to the cost of traditional license deployments.
• The US is two to three years behind the rest of the world, particularly Europe, which has consistently demonstrated the propensity to use open source.
• The number one objection to open source deployment given by CIOs is vendor “lock-in”- the existence of long term contracts or packaging of software that make the integration of one piece of a open source solution difficult.
• Microsoft is still an impediment to open source deployment because of their aggressive bundling of products which act increase their “lock-in.”
• The biggest challenge facing open source software vendor is the lack of active and talented open source community software developers as many of the top talent move in-house to software providers and integrators.