Matthew N. Asay Open source hastens software's natural trend toward standardization/commodification. While technologically innovative companies will always find ample customer interest, the most important innovations for the next decade of software will come from business model innovation, mostly spawned by open source license requirements. Open source builds a new intellectual property regime centered on the source of code, not source code. Protection, in other words, shifts to "owning" the code creator, rather than the product she creates. Those business models that acknowledge this and leverage it will yield better profits than those that attempt a halfway embrace (or rejection) of open source. |