The coming two-horse race: Open source vs. Proprietary X
Posted by: admin in Business and PoliticsI had breakfast with Scott Switzer, CTO of OpenX, in New York yesterday, and spoke at Dave Rosenberg’s MuleSource conference this day, where I had the chance to talk with Dave, Larry Augustin, and others from the open-source world. One thing seems fairly clear to me:
Done right, most open-source companies face a two-horse race: the leading open-source vendor against the leading proprietary vendor.
Reality is not so clean, of course. There are still a range of leftover incumbents from software’s heady days of massive license fees, which will endure for some time. But these are simple fodder for the large proprietary companies to either mow down or acquire, and for open-source companies to undermine on their way to market penetration.
Good marketing leaves just two competitors standing. The reality is that there will be one (or, at most, two) strong open-source offerings duking it out with one (or, at most, two) strong proprietary offerings. Each time someone talks up Tibco in an article, you want the journalist remembering that MuleSource is on its heels. The same is true for all open-source projects.
With this in mind, here are some of the leading match-ups:
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