Open Innovation

Posted: Monday 24th of October 2011 02:46:28 AM By Brian Flannery

Last week I wrote a bit about the extent to which Open Source software has become accepted - and in fact an expectation - in many Enterprise Infrastructure stacks, and particularly so when it comes to IaaS Cloud computing:

http://open.eucalyptus.com/blog/2011/10/17/world-flat

This evening while I was hopping from link to link reading about KVM's slow but steady inroads into the hypervisor market, and the oVirt project I came across an interesting article that shared a lot of my points, but was slightly broader:

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Opening-the-Door-to-Innovation-73448.html

While I think the whole piece is well thought out and worth a read, I felt the author really hit the nail on the head, at gets at the heart of the point I was making last week:

"In today's modern computing environment, there's even more incentive to go the open innovation route: integration with and inclusion in other projects. Considering how many software components form the basis for data center automation, cloud computing and all virtualization, it's rare that a new technology could infiltrate data center infrastructure without being open source. Looking around your basic data center, there's an awful lot of Linux, MySQL, Xen, KVM, Apache, Puppet, Chef, Hadoop and other core open source pieces. Granted, there are also proprietary pieces to round out the components, but name the last technology not named "VMware" to permeate the data center infrastructure stack. In fact, open innovation methodologies and open source software have made entire business models viable, when before they were not . The core pieces that make things "go" are overwhelmingly open source. To even be part of the conversation, either you must have truly revolutionary technology, or you're open source. How can you participate in the projects and communities driving the cloud computing revolution if you don't follow the open innovation ethos? While it's certainly possible to participate, it's much easier if you also implement open innovation processes and, thus, release open source code. If you have code that you'd like Puppet, KVM, Linux kernel and other developers to adopt, what do you think is the quickest way to do that? If you have software that you'd like to be adopted by the same people who stretch those same technologies to the max, what is the best way to accomplish that?"