Stay Competitive with the Open Source Advantage: Stakes and Opportunities for executives

Progressively and widely, the big, biggest companies or industries are moving their IT infrastructures under Linux  or under the Open source software. The stake here is first efficiency. that means that: they can control, create, quickly and protect their apps.

Jeremy Eder works on network performance for Red Hat's CTO Office, here its opinion and its statement:

‘’It's well known that DreamWorks relies heavily on open source software (Linux in particular). But to have them contribute directly using The Open Source Way, truly deserves a closer look. What could have led them to possibly eliminate any competitive advantage derived from OpenVBD?

While I have no specific knowledge of DreamWorks' particular situation, here are some ideas:

• The industry moved on, and they’ve extracted most of the value already.
• They are moving on to greener pastures, driving profit through new tools or techniques.
• Maybe OpenVBD has taken on a life of it’s own, and although critical to business processes, it would benefit from additional developers. But they’d rather pay artists and authors.

If I had to guess, it would be closest to:

• The costs/maintenance burden for OpenVBD exceeds the value derived. Set it free.

Now it's the competitor's move. Will they simply study OpenVBD and take whatever pieces they were missing or did poorly? Will they jump into a standardization effort?

The answer may lie in the competitor's view on the first bullet above, and if they have a source of differentiation (aka revenue), outside of the purpose of OpenVBD. If they do, standardizing tools will benefit both parties by eliminating duplicate effort/code, or possibly reducing/eliminating maintenance burden on internal tools. And that will generate better software faster.

This speaks to a personal pet peeve of mine; duplicated effort. Again and again I see extremely similar open source tools popping up. For argument’s sake, let's say this means that the ecosystem of developers spent (# of projects x # man-hours) creating the software. If they'd collaborated, it may have resulted in a single more powerful tool with added feature velocity, and potentially multiplied any corporate-backed funding. That’s a powerful reason to attempt to build consensus before software.’’(image from http://opensource.com).