O’Reilly: Network has become the platform (2024)

New classes of companies have been built on open-source software

The open-source community is in the midst of a change, with the network increasingly becoming its own platform built on open source software, said Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Mediaon Tuesday.

This has been demonstrated by the rise of companies such as Google, eBay, and Amazon.com, which can operate unfettered from open source licensing concerns because they are not distributing software.

“They deliver their software as a service,” O’Reilly said.

O’Reilly was one of several keynote speakers at the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, which runs through Thursday. O’Reilly is the founder and chief executive officer of O’Reilly Media, a publisher of computer programming help books.

New classes of companies have been built on versions of open-source software, which is fueling the growth of large Web sites, a concept O’Reilly said he calls Web 2.0.

The question of how those companies use open-source software has become more ethical and value-based, O’Reilly said. It all means more questions for the open source community over just what the definition of “open” may mean in the future, he said.

“I really think we are going to end up asking ourselves five to 10 years from now, do we need a free data foundation to make sure we get our users data out of some of these services,” O’Reilly said.

As business models and development practices change, its important for open source developers to figure out what are the most important projects, O’Reilly said. Among those projects, O’Reilly said he is watching Ruby on Rails, a Web development framework based on the Ruby programming language. He said O’Reilly Media is working on books about Ruby on Rails.

The Web site, housingmaps.com is another, a mash-up of data from Google Maps and real estate listings from Craigslist. The result is a mix where you can look up a house on Craigslist, which offers classified-ad listings in major cities such as San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

Users can see photos of a property and push pins where the property is on a Google map. So far, the site not affiliated with either Craigslist or Google.

“This is the new face of hacking,” O’Reilly said.

It’s the hacking of data that comes from services rather than on programs. “I think that’s a fundamental challenge to the thinking of open source,” he said.

O’Reilly said he has also noticed a fundamental shift in how software integrates with the PC market.

The PC market is commodity-based and has traditionally found Microsoft dominating the software market and Intel dominating the chip market, with hardware components in between, such as keyboard and mice, O’Reilly said.

Open-source software started with an intent to supplant Microsoft Office and Windows, but the market is now composed of open-source commodity software components such as Linux, Apache, Perl, or Python.

“All of these programs that we know and love have created a role that is analogous to the role of the component PC where value is not captured by selling the components for some outrageous margin,” O’Reilly said. “It’s instead an enabler — a huge expansion of the market.”