Hi, I'm Dave Dargo, I'm the CTO of Ingress, and I'm here totalk about what's driving open source. And to talk about what's driving opensource, I think it's very important that we really talk about the market,because I believe that's what's driving it and I'm going to give you ahistorical perspective of how this came about.
So if we look at a timeline, and we can certainly start backin the 1970s. the 1970s when we really had IBM mainframes ruling the world, itwas very common for companies to write their own software. They had manythousands of developers out there writing their own database software, alltheir own really infrastructure software in-house.
But there was an imbalance in the market, and in thatimbalance these companies were spending lots of dollars and not really gettinga lot in the way of features. As a result, this created a market opportunity.It created a market opportunity for what we saw in the 1980s coming about.
And the 1980s, we saw the establishment of independentsoftware vendors, ISVs. And ISVs went around and they collected a small sumfrom each of their potential customers, they aggregated those monies to bringbalance to the market. And that balance, what we saw is we saw something thatwas more equal. The features that customers were getting were in balance withthe dollars that they were spending. This is simply a natural market evolution,something we would expect from every market.
So as we moved in the 1990s, we saw an interesting marketphenomenon, consolidation. And with consolidation we saw a smaller number ofISVs, independent software companies, delivering the features that thecustomers needed. That led us right back to market imbalance, and with marketimbalance again we had customers spending many more dollars out of balance withthe features that they were getting. And market imbalance always createsopportunity.
And so the opportunity that we see in this decade and movingforward is for open source software. With open source software, we see marketopportunities that are created that naturally creates the mechanisms to helpdrive that market back into balance. So as we get back into balance where thedollars being spent by the consumers match the features being produced by theproducers, we see a much more natural effect of the market. We really see wherethe market wants to be. So the market is going to create for us theopportunities, the capabilities, the tools and the mechanisms for us tosucceed.
So what we certainly see over the past few decades is we seethese cycles between balance and imbalance in the market. What we've also seenis a grand maturity that's come about in the IT industry. That grand maturityhas allows us to drive collaboration and openness. People are seekingtransparency. And transparency is one of the most important aspects of opensource software. Everybody sees how the software is developed, they understandenough about how software is developed, it's not like we're back in the 1970'swhen software was a big mystery, the 1980's when we could only trust big ISV'sto produce the software.
It's gotten to the point now where everybody in the ITindustry can participate. And this transparency is what leads us to havesuccess in the open source software industry. Open source is going to become anatural part of the IT landscape.
