René Seifert - Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Flying back into Bangalore, I made some new friends from my economy class seat-neighbors. One guy from Sweden who works for Volvo and is about to conduct a code-review from their Indian software-development partner. The poor guy is even 2 cm taller than me but at least 45 kg heavier. So you can imagine how much he enjoyed the economy class experience, but explained to me that this was corporate policy and even the CEO flies economy. By the way, Azim Premji, the richest Indian in India, CEO and 80 %-owner of Wipro, is also famous for flying exclusively Economy and recently upgrading privately from his 10 year-old Ford to a Toyota Corolla on the occasions when he is rolling grounded through the streets of Bangalore. I guess these Toyota cars do most importantly stand for reliability. Not that bad given the desperate state of Bangalore’s bumpy streets.

Then the other gentleman, one row in front of mine, was Kartik Subbarao, a Bangalore-born US-citizen who had moved to the United States at the age of 1 and was coming back to Bangalore since 10 years for the first time. Working for HP, one of the world’s biggest IT-companies, he is a staunch advocate of the open source movement, very eloquent and highly enthusiastic about what he does. Indeed one of the main developments over the last years – or as Thomas Friedman puts it in his great book “The World is Flat” - one of the “10 Flatteners”. Fundamentally, I had been aware of open source, but Kartik gave me a real powerful crash-course. Core insights:

1. Open Source is being used by major corporations, too. Not just by exploiting the code in a one-way street, but building up resources (and putting them on the payroll :-) within such a major player. These developers would equally contribute to the open source-project, naturally give the concept a bearing that suits their particular needs, add code to the open source-repository where everything is kept ultimately free, free, free.

2. Hence, the business model around open source no longer revolves around licensing the software but much more on customizations for a particular client, deployments and service. The interesting incentive for the service-part even for a global software player is that giving the new code back to the open source community takes away a lot of pain for bug-fixing and maintenance. It simply happens out of the community.

3. Reversely, knowing of ongoing and existing open source development can by itself trigger a creative process about what can be done very easily and smartly because some major components might simply be already out there. Result: much higher turnaround time at significantly lower cost. The architectural challenge will therefore lie much more in “gluing” various components together or build a purposeful layer on top of them. The gentleman recommended as best resources on open source sourceforge.com, O’Reilly (also their new upcoming job-oriented social network O’Reilly Connection). Also xml.com offers very tangible examples from the Non-Nerd-World on where a Resource Description Framework (RDF) with metadata can do a great job.

4. India is also waking up to the Open Source movement. From tomorrow on there will be a 4-day event at Bangalore Palace dedicated to open source: Foss. This was actually the reason why my front-seat-row-buddy was flying into Bangalore to attend the conference and do some presentations himself. I will try my best to get there at least for half a day or so to have a look.

Bottom line: Software is currently shifting from the incumbent model of a scarce good which commands a price for a license to an infinitely available resource. Combined with software increasingly deployed as a service on a web-server, the local machine’s importance as the main computational unit is fading. Microsoft by now has got the message. Bill Gates wrote recently in an internal memo: “The current services wave will be very disruptive.” I can’t wait.