Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
I recently had the opportunity to hear Stephen O’Grady, industry analyst at RedMonk, talk to a group of us at Black Duck about where open source is going. Stephen started his talk with a provocative question: “Is open source over?”

One might wonder why first question is even being asked. The answer is there are few large, commercially successful OSS companies (like Red Hat). Many OSS advocates hope for more successful commercial companies to ensure its continued success and innovation. Stephen referenced a recent article called “Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage to Succeed” written by the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus, Marten Mickos. In it Mickos said that “for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition.” Mickos advocates for continued experimentation with OSS business models, including “open core” as a strategy for continued innovation.

Another reason some are asking if “open source is over” is that by one metric, Google search volumes, some pretty important OSS projects appear to be declining. Stephen had data going back to 2004 showing the search volume of each of the components of the LAMP stack has declined by more than 50% (Refer to Apache Chart below).  Gadzooks, is open source over?!!

According to O’Grady, not only is open source not over, it hasn’t begun to sratch the surface of its potential. Search volume trends for the rising stars of open source– “android,” “linux cloud,”and “nosql” – have more than doubled in the last few years and are on a steady increase with no sign of slowing down. While Stephen didn’t say it explicitly, the reason for the decline in search volume of the LAMP components appears to be “maturity,” widespread awareness and adoption! People don’t need to search for “Microsoft;” they just know where to find it. And the same is becoming the case for LAMP components.

Stephen has a valuable perspective on open source directions and trends. In a recent blog posting entitled, “Frictionless Computing: What it Means for Infrastructure,” he argues that in addition to the increased availability of applications via marketplaces (Apple’s iTunes, Ubuntu’s Software Center, Android Market, etc.), the availability of code and data contribute significantly to frictionless (easier) computing. Black Duck contributes to the community and to making computing easier with our Koders.com code search website. It has over 3 billion lines of code and is used by tens of thousands of developers a day. There’s little doubt in our mind that Stephen is right: computing is getting easier, open source is not over, it’s just beginning. What do you think?