William Bartlett
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

I must disagree with several points in this article because there are many counter-examples.

Open-source Has Made Money Spread Downwards

There is quite a bit of flow of money from big companies to smaller ones. Just look at the number of startups acquired. Red Hat is growing, and is a major contender in the PaaS market. They recently paid $250m for CoreOS who make open-source software.

Also, look at the odd case of Docker Inc. They haven’t been able to make much revenue for investors and yet they have attracted quite a lot. It is quite possible that Docker Inc will end as an enourmous loss, whereas the cloud container business will have better benefitted other companies. This means a lot of investors’ money will have been distributed across Docker’s employees. The only other likely way this story will play out is that a company like Microsoft acquires Docker Inc. That will be a sizeable sum paid for essentially open-source software.

Speaking of acquisitions, there is even a business model of copying a service in a country where that service does not yet exist. The hope is that when the inventor of that service wants to expand to your country, they will rather buy your startup than try to challenge you.

These startups, like many others, are so successful because open-source levels the playing field. Lean Startup, and DevOps are other reasons small more agile companies can challenge larger established ones. Many countries have seen online banks spring up out of nowhere and force the traditional banks to buy them.

Open-Source Stimulates Innovation

Open-source is a huge impulse towards innovation. Just look at where Microsoft Office is today! The huge changes made in 2007 were because OpenOffice had equivalent features to Office 2003. Linux has slowly pushed Microsoft to change how Windows is sold and the features it has. Apple is regarded as a boldly innovative company. This becomes cost-effective because they have constantly built on open-source solutions to invest their efforts elsewhere.

The Failures of Open-Source?

If open-source has failed anywhere, it’s that the current influx of developers cannot agree. The JavaScript community has the special talent of spawning numerous competitor open-source projects within the same market. It seems that, instead of contributing to an existing project, JavaScript developers prefer to create their own. This is a huge waste of time.

Why The Gap Is Widening

Part of the reason why the gap has been widening since the 2000’s is that there has been a quick succession of three tech innovations: The Internet, Smartphones, and the Cloud. In each case, markets have been won and lost by a landslide because one competitor correctly forsaw the impact and the opportunity, while the others incorrectly guessed that they were just fads.

The only companies that will be of any relevance in 5 years will be those who have embraced DevOps and the public cloud. The others will be left in the dust.

This has nothing to do with open-source, or the wealth of a company. For instance, Microsoft have lost the Internet, and Smartphones. They are losing the impact of their OS, and .Net has failed to dislodge Java (Python and JavaScript have been much more convincing, conquering AI and front-end respectively). They are scrambling to be relevant in the Cloud, Big Data, and AI. They do have a place in gaming to lean on. But will it be enough?

    William Bartlett

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