As a huge fan of open source in all its various forms, I get a kick when a company so focused on secrecy shoots themselves in the competitive foot via the limits they place on their customers.

Apples Secrecy Obsession About to Backfire on the iPhone

The future of software is in wrapping value added services around an open platform. Granted, Apple isn’t know for open platforms and you can argue that is part of their success but I strongly believe in the end open wins over closed. Android is going to be interesting to watch.

I’ve been distracted in the past week trying to get a new start-up off the ground so I’ve not been posting much. This caught my eye today though.

Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

What I find interesting is that this layoff did not result from Sun needing to cut costs due to the economy (ok, maybe there was a bit of that) but primarily because their open source strategy is helping them reduce their cost of sales. If the software is free, more people use it and some of those people become paying customers. It tips the sales funnel on its end.

The enterprise software space is due for a change.

Facebook is getting ready to open source its year old application platform. What this means is that other social networks will be able to host the same applications that are all the rage on Facebook without building their own application platforms.

I honestly can’t decide whether this is a momentus occurrence or a non-event. I guess we’ll have to see whether all the applications that have been written for Facebook migrate onto other social networking sites and what the resulting network effect is. My gut is that some of the popular ones will migrate to some of the other major social networks but most will not.

I’m voting for “non-event”. I understand why the applications drive a lot of traffic and page views on the site, but don’t see the value to Facebook to allowing other social networks to leverage this resource. Perhaps they have a strategy I haven’t figure out yet or maybe it is a knee-jerk reaction to OpenSocial. This will be worth watching.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the heads up.

One of the most interesting things I find about using Wordpress to host this blog is the absolutely amazing list of plug-ins that are available for it. There is other blogging software out there (I was a previous user of Typo) but even if it blow the doors off Wordpress (I haven’t found one yet) you almost have to use Wordpress simply because of the ecosystem of developers who support it. Otherwise you miss all the best stuff.

It is this ecosystem that got me thinking about what is required to write software these days. It used to be that if you built the best mousetrap you’d be pretty well off and the mice would flock to it (not to mention the cats). If the software was good, people would use it. Today once of the critical success criteria seems to be your ability to seed an ecosystem of plug-ins, templates and other functional enhancements written by people who are not you. Your software needs to be extensible, if not completely open source.

This is certainly the technique being used by Facebook and others who are trying to make their websites into the defacto operating system for the Internet. And of course you can contrast Firefox with its thousands of plug-ins against Internet Explorer with…somewhat fewer. I think the strategy is sound but the mechanism for ensuring that an ecosystem does blossom around your software is not so clear.

One thing is certain though, without it you aren’t going to be wildly successful. Extendable software is here to stay.

As an aside, there is a decent list of Wordpress plug-ins on the Daily Blog Tips blog. There were a few I hadn’t come across before and they look useful.

Lately I’ve been taking a closer look at the open source application space as part of a business plan I’m thinking about. Now, I’m no a stranger to this space as I’d spent a good six months looking at different ideas in 2004 and we built TravelGator almost 100% on open source technology, but back in 2004 I decided that there needed to be a lot more adoption by large corporations before open source software - especially business applications - had a shot of really making a solid business model.

Having done another deep dive recently I think that time has now come. The advantages of open source over proprietary software are just too significant to ignore and in my consulting activities I see the pain that closed systems are causing my clients. Excessive expense, lack of flexibility and huge adoption costs are almost guaranteed whenever you try and integrate a large proprietary system into the enterprise.

Given how fast software changes and how much modification is required to fit it to a specific company’s IT environment, the inherent openness and flexibility of open source products just make sense. The argument becomes even more convincing in the areas of the enterprise where competitive advantage is not necessarily derived through IT solutions and cost savings are a bigger driver. For example, CRM systems like SugarCRM, accounting systems, etc.

We’ve already seen the advantages that open source can bring to the OS via Linux, the database via MySQL and the application stack via JBOSS. Not to mention all the frameworks out there that facilitate rapid development like Ruby on Rails and Python. Furthermore, open source has certainly proven it can scale given that Google runs their entire operation on it along with many other high volume online companies.

The other big change is that conferences like the Open Source Business Conference are giving the space the credibility and visibility necessary to encourage enterprise adoption of these products.

So is the time now for open source to step out of the OS and application stack and into the application? I’m thinking it is.