For many years the software industry was characterised by one central point: walled gardens. Each vendor tried to lock in its customer into his software dependancies - with closed software boundaries or at least proprietary APIs and components. But something is changing - many markets nowadays are changing to a greater openess by providing software based on industry standards, setting on top of open-source programming frameworks, turning towards advanced modularization e.g. through an aspect-orientated programming, including or substituting functionality by open-source best-of-breed-solutions or opening completely towards an open-source-project.
The driving forces behind the increasing openess of commercial software solutions are not the so often mentioned competitiveness of open-source solutions within the same markets - at least for the content management applications I can say that the open source content management solutions are as closed and walled as the commercial ones are. No - the driving force is the increasing complexity of the customer’s requirements. The solutions seeker want the software to interact, exchange with and aggregate from other solutions. Because the customer’s company are changing from hierarchical and functional organized structured towards decentralized process-orientated structures. And software needs to reflect these changes. Therefore an opening of commercial software packages is a must-be to sustain market competitiveness.
This spoken the news about CoreMedia’s move towards excluding parts of its developement into an open-source package is not surprising. (One of it’s competitor set already this path five years ago: Day Software and its CEO David Nüscheler with ther JCR 170 standarization efforts and the DAY CRX, an open source content management backend based on the standard.) Despite the customer’s demands there is also the increased value aspect of an open-source project being part of my software. Accurately introduced an open-source project and the developing community behind the project gives the opportunity to “harness the collective intelligence” (as Tim O’Reilly always says regarding the core value of Web 2.0 technologies). This is also what Sören Stamer told me in our brief interview regarding the Jangaroo-project:
Eine Business-Strategie ist es insoweit, dass wir Open Source als einen starken und zunehmend wichtigen Werttreiber für die IT-Welt und unsere Gesellschaft ansehen. (=> “… we see open source as strong and increasingly important value driver for the software industry and our society …”)
And excately these words and the underlaying views of the software business are the reasons why I am so interested in CoreMedia’s efforts. They emphasize the vast opportunities Sören Stamer is seeing in destroying internal hierarchical structures, giving staff members more freedom to develop their interests, opening up towards dialogues also with external stakeholders and in the end also opening up CoreMedia’s market offering. Here we see the power of the Enterprise 2.0 idea or as Koch/Richter are stating (in German):
„Enterprise 2.0 bedeutet vielmehr die Konzepte des Web 2.0 und von Social Software nachzuvollziehen und zu versuchen, diese auf die Zusammenarbeit in den Unternehmen zu übertragen.“ (=> Enterprise 2.0 means to understand the notion of Web 2.0 (=> see Tim O’Reilly’s statement about the core characteristic of harnessing the collective intelligence) and social software and to apply this towards corporate collaboration and value creation.)
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