After listening to Jon “Maddog” Hall give a speech on open source in emerging countries, I thought about a point that he touched on that was very interesting. In the future, the current model of closed sourced proprietary software will not work. Because of open source software, business models will have to change.

Before we look at the future, we need to look at the past. Back in the 1960’s all software was essentially open. It was developed by small software houses creating very specific software tailored to the customer’s needs. The customer kept the source code, and could make changes to it as needed. It was not until the 1980’s and the development of micro-computers when software companies started packaging general software that all customers might be able to use. Because the software was not for any specific customer, they closed the source to protect trade secrets and other IP. This practice of general software has continued to the present day. The problem with this current closed-source model is that if a customer wants a specific change, a bug fix, a new feature, or a new language, it is very difficult to get closed source software companies to make the changes in a cost effective and timely manner. Most of the time, it’s not in their “best business interest” to make the change. So customers have no option to get the change they need.

Now bring in open source software. If a customer uses open source software they have the freedom to make a change if they want. They have the freedom to get a timely bug fix, to support a obscure language, or tailor the software to their specific needs. To hire a developer may cost them money, but they have the business option to do so. Most of the time, it is far cheaper to hire a developer to tailor open source software to their needs then to buy the proprietary software in the first place. Now the customer has software that does exactly what they want.

I believe that open source software will continue to get better and better to rival anything that Microsoft puts out (arguably already does). Why would customers want to pay exorbitant amounts of money for sub par in-flexible software. I believe that as more and more customers move to using open source software, that the software model will move back to the one that existed in the 1960’s. Customers will hire software houses to take open source code, and tailor it to their specific needs at a fraction of the cost. They can keep the changes and update the code base as needed. The current closed-source software model will not be able to exist.