"Slowly but surely, open source is turning our industry on its
ear. As a result of this trend, I've been wondering whether IT
managers and solution providers have contingency plans for the very
different future that could be in the cards.
"Over the last few years, open source--meaning the royalty-free
deployment of commercially capable and modifiable source code--has
been doing quite well against commercial alternatives. Combine the
success of open source software with the current major
architectural revolution--service oriented architectures (SOA)--and
we may be headed into a world where the only things we pay for (and
that solution providers can make money on) are hardware, outsourced
services, and patents (via royalties).
"SOAs push all development up and away from the operating system
and into the middleware layer. Given the increased focus on the two
viable technologies for such a middleware layer--Sun's Java and
Microsoft's .Net--the operating system itself is becoming
increasingly irrelevant as a development platform. Not only that,
but the playing field is slowly being leveled across the remaining
differentiators such as reliability, performance, manageability,
and security, to the point that operating systems could become
little more than a commoditized kernel of low-level
functionality..."
