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There’s no question that $1 billion valuations are good for the open source industry, but I would argue that MySQL’s valuation had little to do with the company being an open source play and everything to do with a successful, well-executed business plan. It can be detrimental for the open-source industry to get distracted by big valuations and exit strategies at the expense of focusing on how to advance the industry to the next level. Being acquired by a software industry giant may make any individual company’s investors happy, but isn’t necessarily the best path to overall industry success.  Large-scale consolidation may not be the best path for the kind of accelerated innovation the open source community, with its diversity and grassroots style, has championed from the start.

Meanwhile, open source is balkanizing. There are hundreds of thousands of projects on Sourceforge from a variety of developer communities and organizations. Of these, perhaps several hundreds are backed by viable commercial open source companies, but most serve small market segments and only a handful are large enough and mature enough to compete effectively with their larger proprietary brethren all over the world.  Many will partner to provide broader solutions to enterprise customers, but those partnering efforts are limited by the sheer time and effort of building and maintaining business relationships. Given this, how many projects are viable and can meet enterprise requirements? Of those that can, how well do they work together and with proprietary technologies, so that larger enterprises can readily make use of them? These numbers are much smaller than they could — and should — be.

To remedy this, there is clearly a need for more multilateral behavior among open source projects. Solidarity is much more important for these smaller players than it is for the   already-consolidated proprietary vendor community For open source, a multilateral approach is vital for its success.

But instead, open source seems to be splitting off into specific ecosystems such as Eclipse, Apache, and others, with developers choosing to be part of a given "club" over others. Similarly, many leading companies choose to "go it alone", choosing to focus more on their own point products and niche markets, and neglect working with other companies to improve the overall breadth, fit and finish of their solution offerings.  The former may win a deal every now and then, but only the latter will make commercial open source solutions truly mainstream.  The go-it-alone approach isn’t sustainable in a world where the CIOs I mentioned earlier require a fully interoperable solutions, with a “fit and finish” that they need to run their businesses and they have come to expect from the traditional vendors. If we're not careful, current trends can further limit our success.

Consequently, it makes sense that the open source software industry should create a new way for businesses to collaborate but remain independent, to give enterprise customers what they need while preserving everything that makes open source strong, unique and effective.

The OSA is a steward of this path, creating a place where member companies can come together to work on shared problems, to collaborate on making their solutions work better and work better together and to jointly go after customers.  As we enter our second year, we are pursuing this goal with renewed focus and vigor.  Now is a great time for those who haven’t yet joined us to do so, and be part of the ongoing evolution of our industry.

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