Natural Selection

With the proliferation of the technology around the world, it's only natural that people involved in IT would develop the skills surrounding open-source development. There is no great mystery to creating operating systems, Web servers, application servers or databases. What is new is that the emergence of the Internet gave the people with the skills to create these technologies a viable way of supporting them.

Whether you approve of this approach is almost irrelevant. Companies of all sizes and more than a few countries have embraced the compelling economics driving the adoption of open-source technologies. Moreover, professional developers working on commercial applications running on top of open-source technologies are contributing their skills toward enhancing these technologies, which means the skills set that the open-source community can draw upon continues to get more sophisticated each month.

None of this has escaped the notice of companies such as IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems that have hypocritically moved to selectively add open-source products to their portfolios. In IBM's case, this means support for Linux and the Apache Web server is sanctioned, but support for open-source application servers such as Jboss or databases such as MySQL is not. Similarly, Sun likes to pretend Jboss doesn't exist, while it embraces MySQL running on Linux. Meanwhile, Oracle and BEA Systems are in denial about anything open source other than the core Linux operating system.

But unlike Microsoft, these companies can't afford to live in a state of denial. The truth is, the majority of application servers used today are based on open source, and when it comes to databases, at its current rate of adoption, MySQL will pass Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server in the not-too-distant future.

The simple economic fact is that the more widely adopted open-source technologies become, the greater the opportunity to add value on top of these platforms in the form of new and innovative applications. It's no longer about religious fervor. It's about simple economics and rates of adoption.

Are you open to this argument? I can be reached at (650) 513-4227 or via e-mail at [email protected].