Open Source and the Enterprise Infrastructure Stack

One question I keep thinking about is how much of the enterprise infrastructure stack will open source penetrate?  People like Marc Fleury at JBoss   believe that open source will keep climbing up the stack and move up from application servers to the middleware platform. 

One recent article that does a terrific job of capturing the lifecycle of open source development is Craig James's The Care and Feeding of FOSS.  He believes that open source projects start really taking off when a product reaches the maturity stage:

 

With the slow pace of innovation of the Maturity phase, the FOSS community begins to slowly but     inexorably erode the technical lead held by the commercial offerings. FOSS versions of the technology     may have been present all along, but the pace of innovation during the Expansion phase often left     them in the dust. But now, with the technology mature and the pace of innovation slow, FOSS becomes     the proverbial turtle, plugging along toward the finish line, slow but unstoppable. Feature by feature,     the FOSS developers eat away at the commercial products.

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The commercial suppliers are doubly cornered. First, the product is no longer cutting edge, so staffing is reduced and management interest is low.   Since there's little innovation, R&D costs are low, which means profits are high. Developers who want   to innovate are discouraged, because there's little potential return on investment.

Second, the technology has expanded to the logical boundaries, and additional features are less and   less relevant to the core technology. These two factors slow innovation dramatically in the commercial   sector.

Sooner or later, the FOSS product not only matches the commercial products feature-for-feature, but   the nature of open-source software makes the FOSS product more reliable, higher performance and (where   security is a concern) more trusted.

This worldview postulates that the commercial software companies will be the ones who will continue to innovate while the open source community will dominate the more mature technology categories such as operating systems, databases, app servers, etc.

Larry Ellison in an interview that was blogged on Always On has a different take on open source:

The interesting thing is that for an open source product like MySQL to get a lot of traction, they're going to have to walk down the same road that Linux did, which is to get a lot of very large companies to support them. There is this myth that Linux was created and popularized by a bunch of guys who worked by day at hobby shops. Then supposedly they'd go home and program in Linux in their free time. But in fact, the biggest supporters of Linux are businesses like IBM. IBM is not a hobby shop. Oracle, we're not a hobby shop. Hewlett Packard. There are huge companies supporting Linux and the open source movement. MySQL doesn't have that same kind of support behind it. SAP is the first large company to begin to support MySQL, but again, if you compare that landscape to the number of companies that are willing to launch Linux...there are just a bunch more companies supporting Linux. So I don't think you can just paint with a broad brush and say it's "open source versus not open source." It's "open source that has support by the technology industry."

If you believe Ellison's worldview then you would feel that open source can only start climing up the stack if there are large technology players behind it.  I don't buy that.  I am closer in my thinking to Craig James than I am to Larry. 

One concern neither of them mention is the legal indemnification issue.  Authorship in open source by its very nature is muddled and its often hard to know whether contributers provided original code or have polluted it with copyrighted code.  Until the legal indemnification issue is solved or atleast until large companies can stand behind the open source code, most large enterprises are going to feel uncomfortable taking the plunge.