Simon Willison’s Weblog

Doc’s thoughts on Linux Lunacy

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.