Simon Willison’s Weblog

Doc’s thoughts on Linux Lunacy

1st November 2002

Doc Searls is back from the Linux Lunacy cruise, and has been talking about the future of the software industry in What I learned on Linux Lunacy:

That’s over, and it’s not because a pile of overfunded dot-com fantasies crashed to the ground. It’s over because the market doesn’t want it any more. The market wants something more like professional services--architects, designers and builders. Good businesses all, but not the kind that are “venture scale”, as they say.

I think this is the classic business case for open source software—pay software engineers to buld custom solutions from freely available (open source) components. The engineers make a good living, the company gets good software and hopefully some more open source material is fed back to the community as a result. Is the market really heading that way? A lot of very smart people seem to think so. The next few years could be very interesting indeed.