You're probably tired of hearing about open-source, but I'mgoing to ask you to bear with me as I talk about open-source and where I thinkopen-source and software in general is headed.
And I want to talk about a new breed of software developersthat are taking advantage of their open-source development process and thecommunity which we can call and I'm not the first one to call it this OpenSourcerers. So I add a few letters here and of course what couldn't be asourcerer without the appropriate equipment, get the little hat, some half moon,some stars, etc. to make them special wizards of open-source. But it's not justopen source. So over here we'll put open-source, free open-source LAMP meaningLinux and Apache and MySQL, and PHP, Python, etc., free, yes, not exactly freefor support and maintenance. But the notion that the community is building thesoftware and that that community is making that software available for anyoneunder various license agreements to work with.
Now, what we're seeing is the rise of open-source and opensourcerers and the reason is because open-source provides a foundation forother software to be built on top of. So you could think of open-source asproviding the infrastructure, the basic building blocks of software and on topof it the sourcerers are building what I would call hybrid applications thattake both open-source and closed source or proprietary software that you wouldget from other companies that are selling it for a price. They are either fromMicrosoft, SAP, you name the company. They sell it today, that's thetraditional way software has been sold.
Now with these hybrids people can really focus on creatingsome differentiation on top of industry standard open-source software and thesenew hybrids developed by these open sourcerers are going to be really where thebig innovation in software comes from because you don't have to spend all yourtime building the stack from the bottom up. Just focus on those areas where youcan add differentiation and importantly you can make money.
So, here there's lots of opportunities for maintenance,support, for putting together distributions. We're seeing lots of companiesthat are working on that, SpikeSource and UpSource and SourceForge and allother kinds of organizations to help in that area. But here companies are goingto differentiate themselves on what they build on top of the set, as my friendDr. Schulz says, "More money would be made because of open-source and withopen-source."
