OSCON - Back at it

As always some excellent sessions at OSCON. I’m amazed at how well attended the conference is this year. I’m guessing (just looking at the sequence of numbers on nametags) that we’re talking about 1500 or so people at this thing. That’s pretty cool.

Had to go to the “Commerical OSS Business Panel” which was moderated by Tim O’Reilly and had Bob Lisbonn (VC), Matt Asay (Novell), Zach Urlocker (MySQL), Jason Matusow (Microsoft) and Brian Behlendorf (CollabNET) on it. This was almost exactly the same panel that was at the OSBC and the talk was just as lively as you would expect.

Jason Matusow played the Microsoft party line which of course fits with anything you’d hear from somebody on Wall Strett: uniqueness leads to scarcity, scarcity leads to value and value is what makes companies interesting to VC’s and allows them to make money. This makes sense for pretty much every traditional business model (including Microsoft’s) but doesn’t fit with open source for obvious reasons. Of course people need to get their licks in on Microsoft and Jason had some excellent points. Matt Asay chimed in with an interesting thought; software is not about owning the source code anymore … its about owning the source of the code. Looking at MySQL and JBoss as examples, these companies employ the vast majority of the developers that commit changes to these codebases. That’s a big deal and that is what generates value for their customers and shareholders.

To me, the real value in open source is the community (also considered the source of the code). The eyeballs familiar with the code and willing and able to make it better over time. That’s value. Look at companies like Google and eBay … their big value is in the customers they serve and their ability to help customers help themselves; that’s open source in a nutshell. I would be willing to bet that a VC would be more interested in a company with more customers than more intellectual property.

Companies specifically leveraging open source to make money (JBoss, MySQL, etc) are doing so by answering the age old question “what is the main thing?” A lot of their customers could easily staff up to support, write and manage over time the development of these applications. But why would they? For a reasonable price (and no lock-in) these companies can turn to MySQL and JBoss to do the work for them. This allows these companies to better manage the bottom line over time as well as increase value for their customers.

I also attended a talk by Jason McManus talk about eCommerce API solutions at eBay (and by extension PayPal). Jason is a funny guy and good with a crowd even if he is a bit self-effacing (we don’t hold it against you that you are a .NET developer … your code will work with Mono). I liked the talk and was left wondering if PayPal would ever enter into the market of providing its API to general folks like us so that we can get out from under the Visa/Mastercard requirements for e-commerce.

Finally I went to a talk by the Barracuda Networks about building your own Linux anti-spam firewall. I basically learned a few things a) I could have started Barracuda at the same time they did b) the technologies they started using don’t scale (amavisd-new is fantastic but a pig in terms of resources and I have definitely found the practical limit of through-put with the latest MyDoom virus) and c) their solutions to the bottleneck issues are proprietary. It was a good talk and confirmed mostly what I already knew but it was good to go nonetheless.