Geoffrey Moore, a brilliant observer of tech trends, comments that Open source has crossed the chasm and is heading straight for the tornado. We heard somewhat more sobering views from CIOs at MR's conference. Yes, Linux is there, so are Apache and JBoss, some would even say Mozilla and MySQL, but the enterprise application layer is no where near there, though new players like Dave Duffield may have a hybrid model there - so across the "stack" there are varying levels of success.
The huge nugget from his talk is " that competitors should engage the open source community to manage the commonality across the industry. Commonality is fundamentally anything that does not differentiate competitors or does not provide a competitive advantage. The rewards for adopting this strategy is that resources, which were previously working on commonality, can be repurposed to work on value creating activities". Could not agree more...however as we have seen with offshoring, many software CTOs there too have gone and created their own captive capabilities, rather than leverage available third party embedded in commercial software.
The other thing that has to be resolved is if such open source components are embedded in commercial software, what will buyers face in the way of potential future liability for that IP. I know several CIOs are terrified about this.
