Time for an Open-Source StrategyWhether you make commercial software or use it, open-source may radically affect your businessby Michael J. Hudson Continued from Page 1 The problem is that businesses are still trying to find ways to make money by selling products. Microsoft is already beginning to feel this pain. However, businesses need to take a step back and focus instead on making money by improving customers' experience. Actually, this tack would include providing general services for other companys' products as well. In the software industry, this strategy translates into focusing your business acumen on services rather than content. Open-source software and open-source component libraries can be found for almost anything you can imagine. Unless you're in a niche market, as a company, you probably shouldn't try to reinvent the wheel and get people to buy your proprietary version of an application. Instead, think about providing ways for bettering the user experience around the application. In the services market, the current moneymaker is integration services. While anyone can get and change open-source software, that doesn't mean that just anyone can do it well. Providing services that help organizations integrate their disparate systems is one way to add value to an application. Also, an organization can provide training and best practices, documentation, or mentoring. This is just the top of the list of ways that organizations have currently restructured their business models to make money off a product that's essentially free. Imagine all the other business models that companies haven't touched yet because of people's tendency to stick to the old way of doing business. But for inspiration, look at IBM. A number of products that IBM offers or helped develop are open source. From Linux distributions to Java tools to code libraries to XML editors, almost all such products can be obtained in some form from IBM's own Web sites. However, IBM still makes a lot of money. Much of that profit comes from repackaging a number of these technologies in more usable ways, or providing services to integrate them into customer applications. Look at Red Hat, which is in the black even though its business revolves around a free operating system. Again, Red Hat provides to its customers a number of services and other products that add tremendous value to the Red Hat Linux distribution. In the end, the future of content and software is freedom. Freedom drives innovation and decreases overhead. Software is increasingly becoming free to use or change, and I don't see this trend going away any time soon. Companies should reconsider the way they think about business. Open source isn't going to cause the end of capitalism. Capitalism will always find a way to move ahead. We just have to make sure we're not left behind. Michael J. Hudson [mjhudson@praxiseng.com] is a software architect for Praxis Engineering Technologies in Annapolis Junction, Md. His current work includes developing enterprise architectural solutions for both commercial and government clients.
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
