Nokia Acquires Trolltech, Continuing the Trend of Greater Involvment of Traditional Software Companies in Open Source

Nokia announced that it will be acquiring Trolltech. This acquisition continues a trend of traditional software companies becoming active in using open source software and business models. For example, Citrix acquired Xensource and Yahoo acquired Zimbra. Consistant with this trend, Nokia provided the following explanation:

"The technology landscape evolves and, for Nokia, software plays a major role in our growth strategy for devices, PCs and the integration with the Internet. We continue to focus on areas where we can differentiate and add more value. Common cross-platform layers on top of our software platforms attract innovation and enable Web 2.0 technologies in the mobile space," said Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia. "Trolltech's deep understanding of open source software and its strong technology assets will enable both Nokia and others to innovate on our device platforms while reducing time-to-market. This acquisition will also further increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40."

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/UKM00728012008-1.htm


Traditional software companies understand that open source is a very powerful force in the software industry, a view confirmed by several recent reports on the penetration of open source software. Dennis Byron, the anaylst, summarized these reports very effectively in his post http://www.ebizq.net/topics/open_source/features/8842.html?page=1. He notes that according IDC open source software revenue in 2006 was $1.8 billion (about 1% of all software revenue), but has a growth rate three times the growth rate of traditional software. He also provides a very useful discussion of the difficulty of measuring the growth of open source software.

These reports are consistant with Gartner's report last year: Gartner declared open-source software "the biggest disruptor the software industry [Gartner] has ever seen and [Gartner] postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models." They stated that open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research. http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-source-paradigm-shift.html. IDC has estimated that open source revenues will increase to $5.8 billion in 2011, which represents an annual growth rate of 26 percent from 2006 to 2011.

Byron's conclusion is that open source and closed source models are converging and that over time software users will be more concerned about functionality and price rather than "open source" or proprietary. http://www.ebizq.net/topics/open_source/features/8842.html?page=5. This conclusion is consistent with the results from our 2007 Open Source Think Tank http://thinktank.olliancegroup.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=61 (We will be holding our Third Annual Open Source Think Tank next week and you may find out more about this invitation only event athttp://lawandlifesiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2008/01/thinking-forward-on-commercial-open.html)

Open source has entered the mainstream and needs to be part of the strategy of all software companies.

Paying Developers: A New Way to Develop Community

In Bangalore at FOSS.IN, Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystem's open source guru, announced on Friday that Sun will be establishing an "award program" to support innnovation and advance open source development relating to its products. He describes the program as providing a "substantial prize purse". The fund will be divided into six chunks of about $175,000 each — war chests to ignite original ideas in six streams or communities working on Sun-created open environments: OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice and OpenSparc. http://www.hindu.com/2007/12/08/stories/2007120854141800.htm


This announcement deals with one of the most fundamental questions in the FOSS industry: will the future of FOSS be constrained by the limited number of programmers who are willing to work for free? This issue translates into the more immediate question for FOSS companies of how to motivate FOSS developers to become part of their community given the proliferation of FOSS companies and projects. Many industry commentators have emphasized that developing a robust community is critical to the success of a company depending on an open source business model. This announcement may mark the rise of a new approach to community development.