RedMonk co-founder analyst Stephen O’Grady calls out Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri’s statement that “Open source never seems to be the innovator. Instead, it seems to disrupt pricing power for established technologies” in a blog post today. O’Grady cites a few examples of innovative open source software, but focuses instead of the motivations for creating software today.

O’Grady writes:

There are numerous counterexamples to this; my analyst colleague from the 451 Group Rachel Chalmers cites Unix, others the underlying protocols of the internet and I myself would point to the more recent work that browser teams like Chrome and Mozilla are doing or the pre-Cambrian explosion currently occurring in the non-relational database market. But superficial questions like “can open source innovate” obscure real, fundamental changes in the way that software is being developed today. Changes that are important.

O’Grady lists a number of open source projects – some more innovative than others – including Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop, Git and Ruby on Rails and points out that what they all have in common is that they were created (or at least funded) initially to solve an internal problem, not to build a business around. ” What the incentive is for a given project, and what that dictates with respect to the development model employed, is likely to say less about whether the software is innovative than the nature of the problem it is intended to solve,” O’Grady concludes.

Services Angle

I agree with O’Grady. What really motivates great developers and innovators is having interesting problems to solve.

This is an issue that’s really spilling into cloud services where different offerings can become commodities quick. One example I keep coming back to is the platform-as-a-service market. Every player in this market is racing to support every major development stack. After that, the next arms race is support for as many infrastructure-as-a-service cloud as possible. But these aren’t fundamentally interesting problems to solve, and the real differentiation between PaaS players will come from elsewhere. For some it will be more about execution than innovation. The companies with the best support and up-time will have a huge advantage over competitors. And the companies with the best execution may or may not be the companies that were most innovative.

But the real differentiators in PaaS may come from new innovations which solve problems that no one else has solved yet. These may be deployment or monitoring problems, or problems no one has clearly identified yet. The solutions may get released as open source projects, or may kept in house as secret sauce. But the motivation to create these solutions will be good problems.