Tim O’Reilly wrote an interesting piece on a paradigm shift in software development due to Open Source practices:
Open Source Paradigm Shift by Tim O’Reilly — This article is based on a talk that I first gave at Warburg-Pincus’ annual technology conference in May of 2003. Since then, I have delivered versions of the talk more than twenty times, at locations ranging from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the UK Unix User’s Group, Microsoft Research in the UK, IBM Hursley, British Telecom, Red Hat’s internal “all-hands” meeting, and BEA’s eWorld conference. I finally wrote it down as an article for an upcoming book on open source,”Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,” edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. R. Lakhani and to be published by MIT Press in 2005.
He talks about software as a service, with customization and content for and by users being the key. Isn’t this common sense marketing and product differentiation? It’s good that it’s an easy piece to follow and is written in a non-confrontational manner. However, most consulting firms have already figured out that the customization and software as a service paradigm is a valid business model. Having Open Source tools makes it easier to eliminate licensing costs for certain system components and increase billable hours and head count.
At this point, it looks like the whole industry is trying to commoditize the entire software development process — the methodologies used (CMM/CMMi used in government contracts, PMI certifications), the knowledge held by the developers (MCSEs, SCBCDs), the designs undertaken (design patterns, UML/MDA), the components used (SOA, CBD), the project teams (offshoring, outsourcing), and, of course, the final product itself, sans customization. There’s always a next step.
The question is: Will that next step cost more than doing something completely different? Isn’t this still pretty evolutionary stuff that’s happening? Wouldn’t a paradigm shift require something more fundamentally different than moving from a mainframe to a desktop to an ubiquitous web browser? Or am I taking this out of context? Wouldn’t the industrial revolution, the widespread use of electricity allowing people to work 24 hours a day, the use of telegraphs, the use of phones, the use of truly mass media (radio/TV), the widespread use of modern-day computers (whether mainframes or desktops), and the heavy use of the Internet be better examples of true paradigm shifts in business practices? I guess I have the wrong frame of reference…I think most folks know where things are headed. You just have to ask yourself, “What do I want, and how do I get it?”
