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Open Source Software: Transforming Business

by webpros

Open source is having a huge impact on the software development
business, and it is going to continue to have a huge impact on
the future of software development.  Just as computer hardware
has become a commodity over the last couple years as
manufacturing and production efficiency have increased, the same
thing is going to happen with the software development industry. 
Many may decry this statement.  But it is true and it is
happening already.  The thing is, we don't need to fear this
commoditization of software.

Open source is changing software development at a fundamental
level.  Once software developers were highly paid to build
specialized software systems.  These included things such as
databases, interface libraries and other fundamental and
foundational software packages.  At that time, these tools didn't
exist, so they had to be created.  This created a foundation that
other people could build on.

When you look at these systems, take databases for example, they
may be extremely complex systems, but on a larger scale, they
don't really do anything by themselves.  They are a piece, a tool
that can be used as a foundation to build a more complex system. 
A database by itself is nothing.  In and of itself a database has
little value.   It has to be utilized by another system before
its true value becomes apparent.

I believe that the commoditization of software is going to
create a "Lego" effect.  A database or an image manipulation
library could be considered "blocks".  They do one thing, it is
very specific and they do it well.   They are very specialized
pieces of code.  But like a Lego block, by itself, a single
library is rather useless.

The value of having all these specialized open source projects
that are out there, means developers have more options.  There
are more blocks to build with.  The fun stuff happens when you
take these various blocks and you start bringing all the pieces
together.  Individual pieces of specialized software can be
brought together to form complex systems that will do some
amazing things.

At this point, developers become more like architects.  They
don't have to worry so much about how and what little pieces of
code are doing.  They can focus more on the macro level, and
making sure the entire system is doing what needs to be done. 
They focus on putting the blocks together in the right order. 
When this happens, the important skills for software development
are going to change.  It will be important to know what packages
are available, and to have the programming knowledge and
experience to pull everything together into a coherent system.

There, of course, will always be the need for people to build
more or specialized "bricks".  But as more and more open source
software packages become publicly available, developers will be
able to worry less about the nitty-gritty internals and focus
more on the wider scope of a their projects.

Nexation (http://www.nexation.com/) is a <a
href="http://www.nexation.com/">php web development</a> company. 
They leverage open source to accelerate software development and
build innovative business solutions.

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