Open source is not to blame for a lack of industry standards
One commentator blames the virtual data center mess on open source. Here’s why that’s wrong.
Carol Wilson wrings her hands over the “boring” nature of open source standardization, declaring that “Open source processes can take the fun out of everything, particularly technology wars.” Putting aside for a minute the irony of expecting standards to ever be anything more than mind-numbingly dull, Wilson’s larger argument misses the point.
The problem with open source standards aren’t that they’re boring; it’s that they’re largely the same as the proprietary standards that preceded them. In practice, this presents no problem at all.
I’m not really referring to “standards” in the ODF or MANO sense, i.e., hordes of HP and IBM employees sitting in dark convention rooms, haggling over dotted I’s and crossed T’s. Big enterprises fight over such standards, but eventually the market crowns a de facto standard without any apparent attention paid to the standards bodies.
Take ODF, for example, the industry’s open alternative to Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard. IBM and others raged for years against the Microsoft machine, arguing that OOXML wasn’t a true standard (despite its blessing by the International Organization for Standardization), was too complex, and didn’t go through the proper vetting process. Despite howls of protest (including my own), nobody cared. Nearly a decade later we’re still happily using Microsoft with proprietary file formats, or proprietary cloud services (Google Docs), or none of the above.
“None of the above” is often the market’s reaction to proprietary standards. Microsoft milking a desktop operating system monopoly? We’ll move to the web and to mobile devices. Data tied up in proprietary databases? We’ll introduce a new generation of NoSQL databases. And so on.
It’s much the same in open source, except perhaps such shakeouts happen a lot faster. Wilson disparages the “Hey, we’re open source, we all get along” idea as “nonsense,” and she’s right, though perhaps for the opposite reason than she imagines.
