As mentioned in this CNET article, Tuesday at OSBC London I opened the conference with a suggestion: Europe, the birthplace and cradle of the open source revolution, needs to reassert itself as the center of the open source phenomenon. Linux, MySQL, JBoss (Well, Marc is French with influences of Spain in him... :-), Trolltech, etc. These early open source leaders all came out of Europe.
As open source has commercially matured, however, the United States has taken over. Silicon Valley has funded the next round of open source, and we're not necessarily the better for it. There is an ethos in the projects and startups that emerged from the social democracies of Europe that one doesn't necessarily find in the capitalism-spawned companies.
Let's be clear: I am an unabashed open source capitalist. I live in the US and think the world of many of the rising open source leaders that make their home with me there. But I also have a sense of history, and history points to Europe as the birthplace of most successful open source companies, as well as the headquarters for the most active and successful open source VC, Danny Rimer (Index Ventures) (One of Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter").
The United States will continue to churn out exceptional open source projects and companies. Fine. But that's no reason for Europe to relocate to Silicon Valley and abandon its former leadership. (Even the successful open source companies in the US - virtually every single one of them - were born outside Silicon Valley, like Red Hat, Digium/Asterisk, etc.) It's time for VCs to stop insisting that their portfolio companies relocate to the Valley. Aside from MySQL, that serves the Web 2.0 market, few companies - open source or proprietary - will find their customers in the Valley, so why move to Vendor Land?
It's time for European open source startups to leverage the rise of open source within their government organizations. And it's time for Europe's SIs to assist in the matter by not treating open source as a matter of cost (free), but rather one of code freedom.
In short, it's time for Europe to regain its pride of place in the open source pecking order. There is something about the European mindset that lends itself well to open source software. There's no reason to capitulate on this, and every reason to exult in it and build many new and exciting open source commercial enterprises.
Please?
Posted by Matt Asay on June 28, 2006 11:25 PM
