Open Source: Another Pre-Quake Tremor
June 10, 2008
Dzone (Javalobby department) has an excellent interview that suggests an unexpected open source casuality–software tools. The Web log post is chock full of useful information plus some revelatory screen shots. This is a four-page interview, links, and comments. The subject of the interview is John De Goes, president of N-Brain, a firm that creates UNA, a source code editor. UNA at this time is free. The idea is that a better mousetrap is free, and it may put increasing pressure on the companies in the tools business.
Another key in this nice piece of work is a comment from a user of the open source tool UNA:
UNA is a special platform. Anyone who knows how I code and run projects understand[s] how bold a statement that is for me. Why? I very much believe in the solo hacking til it works. UNA is about group – real time collab. I usually hate group collab on code and design because the communication and miscommunication gets in the way. UNA is different because the collaboration is weirdly seamless and actually real time – you all see the same things, you chat inline, code completion just works, everything is tracked, and never once does the group feature take precedence over just coding. …I sure hope the Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse, Zend, Codeworks, and Nusphere folks pay attention to this and either integrate or buy N-brain[‘s technology]. Seriously, the system is that cool.
I interpreted the interview and this biting observation as meaning that open source programming tools are likely to take increasingly large bites of the proprietary software tools market. Why’s this important? Lucene, Nutch, FLAX, and other open source search systems are likely to have a similar impact over time. Read this interview, please.
Stephen Arnold, June 10, 2008
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3 Responses to “Open Source: Another Pre-Quake Tremor”
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I think Lucene & friends are already having this impact on search. Sematext ( http://sematext.com/ ) constantly hears from people evaluating Lucene or Solr against the expensive Endeca or some such. This is probably related to that Autonomy piece of news…
Otis, I appreciate your taking time to offer a thoughtful comment. Please, feel free to add other insights about search and content processing. Also, don’t hesitate to tell me if you think I am off base. A lively dialogue is useful whether I am correct or incorrect.
Stephen Arnold, June 11, 2008 5 pm Eastern
We’ve also been contacted by lots of people who are evaluating open source alternatives for enterprise search.
There’s still some problems at board level though; FUD from established vendors and a general misunderstanding of the principles involved (“But won’t this mean our competitors can steal our code?”) don’t help.
I think one of the key points is that traditional closed-source systems are still being sold on an outdated price-per-document model. If you can use open source technology to index 20-100 million items on a single standard server (entirely possible with FLAX and I believe Lucene), you can potentially make a massive cost saving.