Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source

Commoditized Consolidation

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I have written often about how the technology industry is commoditizing itself. I have also written about how consolidation is an inevitable process in every industry. Now we see how the two work together and create what some might view as the End of Days (of course those same people had apocalyptic visions when Microsoft announced NT). The big news of the day, week, month, and thus far the entire year is that Sun Micro (of all people) is buying MySQL for a cool billion dollars. So much for Mister Mickos growing rich slowly. This takes the world’s most popular DBMS (in terms of number of installations) and gives it a global sales and support team. Not bad for a hardware company. (The wisdom of forfeitting 8% of Sun’s current market capitalization is suspect however — you can buy a lot of offshore programmer time for a bill) MySQL, like … Continue reading →

Wireless Wedge

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Closed systems make money. Open systems make money. And the two dynamics are co-exists … for a while. I’m pondering these realities as I comb through reports in the wireless market, where Silicon Strategies has a new client. The evolution of the wireless market will soon make a shift and the smarter vendors are rapidly adapting to the inevitable. First, a musing on closed and open markets. In closed markets, the vendor has control by virtue of either a monopoly or through customer lock-in due to the high cost customers face in switching to different technologies. The IT technology industry was a closed market for a seeming eternity until the folks at Berkeley began porting and promoting their flavor of UNIX (which could be considered the original computer virus). When Sun Micro and other vendors began using open standards (like UNIX) as a wedge into the market, the closed system … Continue reading →

G-overnment

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Google’s announcement of their mobile platform sucked all the wind out of both the mobile and open source markets this week … and it is only Tuesday! I won’t argue the good news. The mobile operating system market is so disjointed that it makes Pakistan politics look well ordered by comparison. The dysfunction is due to the primary proprietary plays (Windows and Symbian) not opening the stacks enough to allow significant innovation on the application front. Google’s choice of Linux will drive not only adoption of G-phones, but of all Linux-based handsets, and thus a thriving ecosystem. This is a cascade event. Obscured this week was a little discussed news report on the antithesis of unrestrained capitalism, namely government. In particular, a report showing that the U.S. Federal government is adopting Open Source almost as fast as it is gobbling my tax dollars. I sure hope their IT savings from … Continue reading →