Striding on ‘open’ and level playing field

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Brian Behlendorf founded CollabNet, a provider of tools and services based on open source methods, with O'Reilly & Associates in July 1999. Before launching CollabNet, Behlendorf was co-founder and CTO of Organic Online, a Web design and engineering consultancy located in San Francisco.


During his five years at Organic, Behlendorf helped create Internet strategies for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. During that time, he co-founded and contributed heavily to the Apache Web Server Project, co-founded and supported the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) effort, and assisted several IETF working groups, particularly the HTTP standardization effort.


Before starting Organic, Behlendorf was the first chief engineer at Wired Magazine and later HotWired, one of the first large-scale publishing websites.


Behlendorf is currently a director of the Mozilla Foundation and a retired director and president of the Apache Software Foundation.


In a chat with Srinivas R of CyberMedia News, Behlendorf shared his views on Apache foundation, Open Source community and related topics.


After an extended exchange of pleasantries, Behlendorf turned the clock back, giving a whiff of the earlier part of his career. "I think many of us in the open source industry are kind of accidental leaders. We didn't start our careers thinking that we would be a leader or anything like that. We simply started writing software."


Then, the 34-year-old Behlendorf went on to elaborate. "Often what people know me best for is what I did when I was 20 years old. Being in the right place at the right time with regards to Apache…"


Behlendorf went on and said, "I think people get to know the kind of themes that I have been pushing for open source, for a very long time. Open source is almost boring now because it is so well accepted."


That sparked the interaction.


Correct, but open source is accepted in the Web world. What about in the enterprises? How is it happening?


To say the web world as if it was some separate thing from the rest of IT is starting to disappear. I am sure you still have public websites that are the homepage for a company. But everything that an IT-driven company does today is being done through web-based interfaces; it's almost everything. It used to be the client-server world.


People are starting to realize that the best hop doesn't have to matter anymore.


The operating system you run locally in your client… you can run Linux and be just as capable in a web-based enterprise as anybody running Windows because you can use your web-based interfaces for mailing, for calendaring you can use open office when you need to edit office documents, etc. and when you need to access the enterprise applications, they are all just web pages.


Web services means that the internal enterprises can be web-oriented and open source software is in the first and in many cases implements those web-based interfaces better than the commercial adds to.


When it comes to specific packages like Oracle Financials, there isn't an open source program I can tell you that will drop in there and a drop-in replacement for something like that or for SAP. But there are these little, what I would call mammals in the age of dinosaurs, right, that is scurrying between the footsteps of …kind of as SAP and Oracle do battle each other, and there are projects like open ERP.


There are some companies now that are starting to form around these ERP systems or closed systems; analytic software, starting to go heavily on the open source direction, and we are talking about companies with venture funding, with real revenue, with not just a couple of customers but hundreds of thousands of support fee paying customers, and that's significant, that's something that will grow.



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