Esther Schindler of CIO Magazine is hosting an executive online briefing on Open Source in the Enterprise. She has invited me and a number of much more famous CEOs to sound off on a variety of enterprise open source and Web 2.0 topics over the next week.I am the open-source newcomer in the group, dragged kicking and screaming from my bad old proprietary software background as CEO of Nasdaq-listed Persistence Software into this brave new world of open source.
Despite being a newcomer, I have seen first-hand both the power and limitations of the open source model. At WaveMaker, I saw our download volumes soar by a factor of 20 in two days when we launched our open source product in February - from 50 downloads a day to over 1,000 downloads a day.At the same time, I am now sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the revenue from all these downloads to show up. Will people really pay for a visual development tool for Web 2.0? Will they be willing to pay enough?
In short, the life of an open source CEO is full of excitement and terror!The other illustrious open source executives in the CEO shoot-out include:
- Marten Mickos, the new Sun database czar and living proof that you can be a nice guy and a very successful open source CEO.
- Rod Johnson, the CEO SpringSource and the person who saved Java from its EJB madness.
- Brian Gentile, president and CEO of JasperSoft and one of the most influential early evangelists of Java.
- Bob Zurek, CTO at EnterpriseDB and mastermind behind their Blades partner ecosystem.
- Lila Tretikov, CIO, SugarCRM and very articulate spokesperson for the open source movement.
- Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a key force behind the AGPL license.
- Bob Sutor, the vice president of Standards and Open Source for the IBM Corporation.
- Domas Mituzas, Wikipedia's (board member, active participant in tech projects, and senior manager at MySQL).
- Jon Ferraiolo, leader of the OpenAJAX Alliance
- Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation
- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Novell SUSE Evangelist.
- Bernard Golden, CIO blogger about open source issues.
- Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance.
- Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker. In past and parallel lives, I write the keeneview blog about Web 2.0 technology, used to write a much cooler SF in Paris blog about teaching entrepreneurship in France (no that is not a contradiction in terms!) and generally worry about how we can all get along on our little pebble.
- Matt Aslett, an analyst in The 451 Group's Enterprise Software group who specializes in open source software and contributes regularly to reports on the topic.
- Ira Heffan, legal counsel for TopCoder, who has been involved in GPL v3 and other open source licensing discussions.
- Ron Gula, Ron Gula, developer of Dragon IDS and the CEO of Tenable Network Security which produces the Nessus vulnerability scanner.
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