<ed.note>Larry Augustin (slides 19 & 20) alludes to the fact that open source pureplay economics flatten the typical software vendor hierarchy. It disintermediates the C-Suite (What value do they provide? They're not generating code), denecessitates the sales layer (What

. Furthermore, open source has certainly proven it can scale given that Google runs their entire operation on it along with many other high volume online companies. The other big change is that conferences like the Open Source Business Conference are giving the space the credibility and visibility necessary to encourage enterprise adoption of these products. So is the time now for open source to step out of the OS and application stack and into the application? I

Catchin up on the news from the day.  I attended the Hadoop Summit all day today.., will recap that in a later post.., TONS o stuff happening.  I will try to summarize here. The OSBC conference is happening in San Francisco.  Couple interesting items Venturebeat.  One is about Microsofts general counsel Brad Smith speaking to the crowd about MS changing their tune with working with the Open Source world.  This sounds similar to the tone MS

Having had a day to ruminate about the Open Source Business Conference 2008, a few key takeaways suggest themselves. It was by far the best OSBC yet, with a far more diverse audience and speaking faculty that we've had before. This naturally leads to a diverse set of "conclusions" arising from the event:

Despite a lot of brave talk at OSBC there is little doubt that open source is heading into its first recession. (If you want to explain a recession to your four-year old, here’s one way.) During the last bust, what I call the dot-bomb, open source was the answer to questions on how

That’s what I asked leading open source investor Larry Augustin (pictured left; he founded VA Linux, SourceForge, and backed many more) and Harold Goldberg, chief executive of Zend, at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference, which just wrapped up. All the evidence suggested open source has arrived: This year, some 40 percent of the conference came from the IT departments of large, traditional tech companies, Goldberg estimated

OSBC conference

Conferences are magnets of attention from the business, blogging and tech communities so it’s no wonder that the Open Source Business Conference is the center of buzz on the internet. Wired wonders where in the world are the open source billionaires. In 2007, some 30 open source software companies were purchased for more than $1 billion —

actions speak louder than words. But words are worthwhile too, he said. A whole lot of words (not the promise of action, much less action itself) is what a skeptical crowd got at Smith’s speech this afternoon, one of the keynotes at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference. Smith’s remarks seemed like an olive branch to the open source community, but for the most part he stuck to general assurances that Microsoft wants to work with open source companies. When it came to specific complaints, Smith just repeated,

We’re seeing a paradigm shift in open source business models, said Benchmark Capital Entrepreneur in Residence Rob Bearden at today’s InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference. In the past, open source companies normally moved into a mature market dominated by a few large, complacent players, then found traction by offering innovation and low (or nonexistent) cost. Now, however, there are new opportunities for the next