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09 June 2008 - 22:37A Sign of the Times

On SlashDot, a story called Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools. It's the way Symas thinks the market goes. The evolution of the economics of software development (and the value propositions) seems to make that inevitable.

Developers are no longer a scarce resource and community development has evolved into a potent development approach. People with an idea can collectively develop almost anything in an open source community, we find. And that leaves the development side of the software business worth less and less commercially.

However, the support side of the industry hasn't effectively changed. Enterprises still need quality (commercial, committed) support. So the industry morphs. Developers with the great idea will need to give the idea up to a community of developers and find ways to earn support, maintenance, and custom development/integration fees. Or, they can do it the old fashioned way and hope to find an "exit strategy" that helps them recoup the development monies somehow as the market, particularly the development tools market, seems to be drying up.

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