April 9, 2008 8:31 AM PDT

Open source and innovation: A match made in heaven

Posted by Matt Asay

CIO.com suggests that open source may be the future of enterprise innovation, echoing the Bank of New York Mellon's comments on the subject last week. The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source.

Riffing off the Eclipse Foundation's Mike Milinkovich, CIO.com writes:

[I]f you develop in an open source model and other companies adopt what you develop, you have a higher chance of longevity in the code base. In other words, you can develop a custom solution to a unique business problem with less fear that your solution will turn into a dead-end legacy system when things, inevitably, change in a few years. Milinkovich also sees more CIOs banding together with industry peers to develop common open-source solutions to standard industry processes, thereby saving money by sharing costs and ensuring interoperability.

Amen. Proprietary software is all about vendor-driven innovation. Open source is all about user-driven innovation, collaboratively married to vendor innovation. It's a two-way street, and it's much, much better for both vendors and users.