A cynic rips open source
Open source is not a movement; it's a religion — I chaired an interesting meeting the other day. It was me against senior executives of Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell. — The subject was: Do enterprise users really want open source? Are you strongly supporting this?
Context & Ripple Effects
This column lands in the middle of an identity argument that had been running for over a year: onlamp.com argued in January 2006 there was no open source community at all, while tecosystems' March 2007 open source Q&A tried to pin down what the term even meant for buyers. The columnist's provocation — open source as religion rather than movement — comes from chairing a live debate in which executives of Cisco, Agilent Technologies and Novell were asked directly whether enterprises really want open source.
Novell sits at the sharpest edge of that question: it signed a licensing-and-technology collaboration with Microsoft in November 2006, its Linux desktop chief resigned in early May 2007 after 261 blog entries, and a rumored JBoss acquisition circulated in early 2006 but was never confirmed. A vendor trying to monetize Linux while the community questions its motives gives the cynic's thesis its most concrete test case.
First-order effects
- Cisco, Agilent and Novell were put on record defending enterprise open source adoption against a hostile chair, forcing each to justify it in business terms rather than community terms.
- Novell's commercial Linux push now runs alongside a leadership exit on the Linux desktop side, tightening scrutiny of whether its Microsoft partnership serves customers or vendors.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling open source offerings must compete on cost and interoperability instead of ideology, since the column hands skeptical IT buyers a ready-made counterargument.
- Microsoft's engagement strategy — embodied by its open source point man outreach in January 2006 — gains leverage whenever open source's communal framing is challenged publicly.
Third-order effects
- If enterprises keep accepting open source on economic grounds while dismissing its movement rhetoric, the ecosystem consolidates around commercially backed distributions and support contracts, with community governance becoming a marketing layer rather than a decision force.
- The definitional fight over what 'open source' means — visible across the corpus since early 2006 — points toward license and commercialization disputes becoming the battleground where the term's value is settled.
The trend: Enterprise open source is shifting from an ideologically framed community movement toward commercially packaged products whose legitimacy rests on procurement economics rather than shared belief.