Open Source Weblog

What with the OSBC itself I've got enough to write about for about six blogs, and barely enough time to write one, so here's the edited highlights, and I'll expand on some of them later in the week…

First of all, Microsoft has formally launched CodePlex, it's new collaborative development portal for community-based development for open- and shared-source projects.

"We've been doing community project with shared source licenses, now we have an established venue for sharing code," explained Jon Rosenberg, director of the shared source program. "We've also taken a number of external projects on."

Built on Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, the CodePlex site has been launched as the home to 35 projects, including 12 from inside Microsoft and 23 from outside, and will act as Microsoft's focal point for collaborative development.

Examples of those include the Commerce Starter Kit project, which is under a Mozilla License, the SharePoint Forums Web Part project, which is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Second, there is Microsoft new partnership with MySQL which is pretty interested in the light of the company's previous partnerships with JBoss and SugarCRM.

There there's the European Commission's expected formal ruling against Microsoft, although we've had no formal comment on that at this stage, and I'll probably be back at the OSBC when we do.

Speaking of which, it was an interesting start to the morning, with two standout comments. Alfresco's Matt Asay called on Europe to "reassert its ownership of open source" and re-establish itself as the business centre of Europe.

"Stop moving to Silicon Valley, there are no customers in Silicon Valley, only vendors," he said.

Matt's opening remarks were followed up by a keynote from Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, where he introduced the idea of the "Software Market 3.0" (no O'Reilly trademark, he joked).

As you can see from Simon's explanation software market 1.0 saw buyers making software choices at the same time as their hardware choice, while 2.0 saw the software and hardware segments separated and payment for software paid at the point of acquisition.

Software Market 3.0 sees users able to select and use software as and when they like, and only pay for the software as and when they deploy it. "It's all just there, and you build your solution for your business with what's just there," explained Phipps. "You pay for the software at the point of deployment."

"The software model has to shift away from the right to use and towards delivering value at the time of production. The open source market of the future consists of bundles of value delivering what people require to keep it in production," he added.

Now Software Market 3.0 could end up becoming just another industry buzzword, but I think Simon come up with the best description yet as to what differentiates the new open source model from the traditional proprietary software model.

It's this flexibility to pick and choose, not only the software you want, but the support and additional features you need, that provides value to users while avoiding vendor lock-in. And it's got nothing to do with being able to view or modify the code or be part of a community.

Microsoft is to be applauded for opening up via projects like CodePlex, but if Simon Phipps's theory is right, it is an indication of how far Microsoft still has to go to catch up on understanding the open source model.