Sunday, July 10, 2005

Open Source Innovation

Over at the Microsoft Developers Network there is interview with Steve Ballmer who briefly talks about innovation. Ballmer largely dismisses innovation from the industry leaders such as IBM, Oracle and Apple (all leading innovators in their own right). He briefly lumps the open source movement into this same group. However I think it's important to point out the important innovation of the open source movement is the commoditization of basic software protocals. Because of this commoditization it becomes an innovation engine for business allowing businesses and individuals to launch and develop new business models relatively cheaply.

Take a look at all the innovation that is happening in the web space such as wikis, blogging, geo blogging etc. These all are happening on the open source software stack of MySQL, Apache, PHP, PERL, and Linux. These allows a small shop of developers roll out a site without the added expense of licenses and additional development costs.

I am quite excited about the continually developed tool set that is available to developers today. The type of innovation is web based business models is going to continue for years.