Transcript: What's driving open source?

Description: The software market is evolving as more people participate in what was traditionally a closed and specialized industry. Dave Dargo of Ingres gives a brief history of this evolution and explains how open source is becoming a natural part of the IT landscape.

Hi, I'm Dave Dargo, I'm the CTO of Ingress, and I'm here to talk about what's driving open source. And to talk about what's driving open source, 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 a historical perspective of how this came about.

So if we look at a timeline, and we can certainly start back in the 1970s. the 1970s when we really had IBM mainframes ruling the world, it was very common for companies to write their own software. They had many thousands of developers out there writing their own database software, all their own really infrastructure software in-house.

But there was an imbalance in the market, and in that imbalance these companies were spending lots of dollars and not really getting a 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 independent software vendors, ISVs. And ISVs went around and they collected a small sum from each of their potential customers, they aggregated those monies to bring balance to the market. And that balance, what we saw is we saw something that was more equal. The features that customers were getting were in balance with the 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 market phenomenon, consolidation. And with consolidation we saw a smaller number of ISVs, independent software companies, delivering the features that the customers needed. That led us right back to market imbalance, and with market imbalance again we had customers spending many more dollars out of balance with the features that they were getting. And market imbalance always creates opportunity.

And so the opportunity that we see in this decade and moving forward is for open source software. With open source software, we see market opportunities that are created that naturally creates the mechanisms to help drive that market back into balance. So as we get back into balance where the dollars being spent by the consumers match the features being produced by the producers, we see a much more natural effect of the market. We really see where the market wants to be. So the market is going to create for us the opportunities, the capabilities, the tools and the mechanisms for us to succeed.

So what we certainly see over the past few decades is we see these cycles between balance and imbalance in the market. What we've also seen is a grand maturity that's come about in the IT industry. That grand maturity has allows us to drive collaboration and openness. People are seeking transparency. And transparency is one of the most important aspects of open source software. Everybody sees how the software is developed, they understand enough about how software is developed, it's not like we're back in the 1970's when software was a big mystery, the 1980's when we could only trust big ISV's to produce the software.

It's gotten to the point now where everybody in the IT industry can participate. And this transparency is what leads us to have success in the open source software industry. Open source is going to become a natural part of the IT landscape.

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