It's important not to get too carried away with "the latest tech trend." Technology changes more rapidly than any other sector, and this year's "must have" technology is quickly made obsolete, or so it seems. However, every so often something significant comes along that truly changes the game. Mainframes yielded to client/server, which in turn was replaced by the Web as the dominant computing paradigm. I believe Linux and Open Source more broadly represent a similar game-changing force.
Open Source does two things that fundamentally differ from how proprietary software has worked over the last two decades. First, Open Source returns power to the customer. In the past, customers were largely at the mercy of vendors when considering their computing options. Yes, you could choose between Oracle and SAP, but the vendors determined the timing, features, and price of what you got. If you needed something quickly to meet a business need, you had to build it yourself, or lobby the vendor to include the feature in the next release, which might be years out. With Open Source, things move very quickly. The Linux kernel is updated regularly. New applications can be developed and deployed in weeks, rather than months or years. Customers can use their own resources, but also tap the resources of the Open Source community to get features they need. The flexibility of Open Source gives control to the customer.
The second major difference with Open Source is that it delivers affordable innovation. In the proprietary model, vendors would control what went into their products, spend mounds of money innovating in-house, and charge customers a premium for getting "bleeding-edge" technology. With Open Source, innovation happens from the ground up, includes input from both independent and corporate software developers, and is available, for free, for companies that want to use it. There's no formal product requirements document, no product launch timetable. Developers create solutions to fix holes they see. If the fix is good, it gets adopted. If not, something better is invented. It's an informal process, but it works. And not only is there no premium for this innovation, it's free for the taking.
Linux now provides a viable, enterprise-level platform that works from the desktop to the data center. Novell offers solutions across this range, but we didn't invent Linux and we certainly don't own it. We're a constructive member of the community that has made Linux into an enterprise-quality platform. Our contributions have included applications security technology, management tools, and, on the desktop, we've worked on OpenOffice. Innovation at the server and desktop level is now surpassing what's happening in the proprietary world. The number of applications that are moving to Open Source is expanding daily. Today, Novell has some 2,000 applications certified for our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform.
This growth will only continue. Open Source is a circle. The more solutions that are built for Open Source, the more Open Source is adopted, the more solutions need to be built. Open Source is also a great beneficiary of network effects: the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes because more resources are devoted to improving it. There's no doubt in my mind that Open Source will become the dominant approach to software development in the future. Proprietary solutions will always be there. We see a world with a mix of Open Source and open standards-based solutions. With open standards, integrated applications, and solutions built on a service-oriented architecture and Web Services, plus a never ending well of innovative Open Source solutions, the customer wins. We're proud to be part of this trend and are working to assure it's sustainable.