Global Meltdown FOSS’s Big Opening?

Serdar Yegulalp has a piece over at Information Week that the current recession we are all about to live through will be a big opening for Open Source. Irony is I tend to agree but reasons different from what he espouses. Give a read –

Here’s what I see happening: Companies that have a solid history of experience with marketing and supporting open source — e.g., Red Hat, and also sensible folks like Alfresco and SugarCRM and so on — will weather this without too much difficulty. If they’ve learned how to run lean and mean from the beginning to stay ahead of the commercial competition, that experience will all pay off here. Those who started small, and stayed small and fleet on their feet, will live all this down. Not only that, but a few of them will emerge as model examples for how open source makes economic sense in both good times and bad.

But folks who have transitioned from a proprietary model to an open model (whole or partial) — Novell (NSDQ: NOVL), Sun certainly, a smattering of smaller vendors — are going to get pinched hard. Those who still have the habits gleaned from so many years of selling and supporting proprietary software will have a tougher time of it. The really big folks –IBM (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) — also will feel pinched, but they’re spread out through so many different markets that they won’t bleed as heavily.

Now why do I think he is wrong even though he is right? Well first why he is right. If you are an open source vendor then typically you are selling neither hardware or software. The customer buys the iron and the software is available for download. These companies sell a service-warranty to the enterprise. In that model one HAS to be lean and mean. Serdar also properly diagnoses that coming from commercial to going open source is not a survivable model. The proprietary software industry is too involved in sales, commissions and product entrenchment that cannot be supported by a open source model.

What Serdar misses. Ubiquity. The hall mark of a great FOSS product is its sheer breadth of deployment. Take Open Office, Red Hat, Centos, memcache, or a 100 other FOSS items. They are spread far and wide. That Ubiquity is both a boon and a bane. A boon as a service provider you will be needed. So Red Hat playing their cards right may very well see service contract growth during a recession. Or will they? The bane is a product like Centos. Its a Red Hat knock off. All perfectly legal. 95% of all the VPS server providers will have Centos OS as an offering.

The point? FOSS will gain greatly during this recession and WE WILL NEVER KNOW IT. The reason is that Ubiquity again. In most companies, if they already have some FOSS in production they have some individual knowledgeable on support. That persons role will be expanded and others will be encouraged to learn those skills. All under the radar.

The other is competitive advantage. The CIO will shift the usage to FOSS and not a peep will be heard from. In a competitive market place you don’t telegraph what is keeping you afloat and bashing the hell out of the other guy. You don’t telegraph success lest it be copied by your competition.

We’ll see who is right in a year or so.

Linky.