Information Weekly: Is open-source software a great opportunity for development?

At the cyberposium Conference held at Harvard Business School on October 29, (Beijing Time on October 29), experts pointed out that, the emergence of open-source software will provide a new opportunity for enterprises to enter and succeed in the open-source market. "The Rise of open source software is offering a great opportunity for major companies to enter the corporate market," said David Skok, a general partner of matrix partners venture capital, the quality of software products will also be continuously improved."

Open-source companies such as sourcelabs and spikesource have already entered the enterprise market. They provide open-source software and related services to enterprises. The main representatives of open-source software include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/perl/python, and lamp. "Many companies are reluctant to deal with small companies, so they are looking for large manufacturers. Companies like JBoss can provide many small open-source projects and bring them into their brands ."

According to Marten mickos, CEO of MySQL AB, the reason for his entry into the open-source business is: "for long-term benefits, for us, we are engaged in open-source business, this can reduce marketing costs and product R & D costs. We entered the 'mysql product' in the Google search engine and found that the results were all incorrect. Then we had to correct them ." Mikes said self-interest is not the driving force of open source. He said that people use open-source code to write programs because they want to learn, they want to display, they want to fix, and their actions are open-minded.

At the same time, Skok said that from the perspective of an investor looking at open-source business, he was surprised to find that this business is amazing, "we invested $10 million in JBoss, but they did not directly spend money. If you want to engage in open-source software, you must have a very good community so that you can innovate products ." Mikes also agreed with the role of the Community, but said, "Open-source communities do not represent open-source innovation. Borland has an outstanding community, and Microsoft also has a good Community and developer ecosystem ." Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development at RedHat, said, to become a successful open-source company, "you need to provide more value and you will be smart, you want to learn."

Scott said that the development of open-source software has many basic business models. One of them is the dual-Authorization mode. According to gnu gpl (General Public License), the company provides products for free, and then charges users who want to use them for commercial purposes. The other is the support model, that is, the company provides software for free, but is charged for the support. In the third mode, the software version is provided for free and the upgrade fee is charged. The open-source model "applies to us because of the high complexity of technology," said Mr. Stevens, a red hat company. It needs technical support services. The more complex the software is, the more opportunities the company has to launch open-source businesses, he said. He pointed out that as a large company, IBM has earned a lot of money in open-source software. "They are going to invest in Linux, and IBM's main hardware competitor was Sun, however, since the transfer to the Linux system, IBM's services and hardware sales business have taken a high level." "For IBM, this is an exciting change," Stevens agreed. If you want to become a sponsor, you 'd better sponsor IP addresses. Therefore, patent-owned manufacturers began to enter the Linux market ."

According to Scott, Sun is completely different. "I think Sun is in trouble now and their business operation model has serious problems, but when Sun makes adjustments, the company's shareholders may be insurmountable obstacles. This is Intel's economic rule. Sun has become Intel's seller. On the one hand, Sun has to lose the advantages of Solaris and its hardware products, and on the other hand, Sun must compete with Dell ." "Sun said the company would open 1600 patents, but you may see a purely printed version ." More importantly, "the biggest battle for Sum is that companies have to lose their two major markets: financial services and telecommunications ." He said that about 20% of the financial services market is currently running Linux systems. He recently talked with financial service companies at a meeting. These companies said they had a budget of about $2 billion for purchasing Sun products in the past, compared with only $0.5 million this year, "They started using Dell, HP, and IBM products in Linux."

Stevens praised Sun for a series of measures recently taken, but said, "This is not a regression, unlike the efforts of companies such as IBM to join the open-source community, sun tries to build its own developer community." At the same time, Skok said that he is closely following the CRM software provider SugarCRM. "We are closely following up to see if there is a similar community to help spread open source CRM products ."

Source: eNet power in Silicon Valley