StillSecure, After All These Years: The day the music died ...

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

And they were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "this'll be the day that I die.
"this'll be the day that I die."

They were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "this'll be the day that I die.";
"this'll be the day that I die."

- Bye, Bye Miss American Pie, Don McLean

One of my favorite songs as a kid, it is what I was reminded of reading Stuart Cohen's special report in Business Week, Open Source: The Model is Broken. I think Stuart has laid out for everyone to see, that after all of the money poured into open source business models over the last few years, the fact is that just thinking that adding support and services to open source software is a good business is in fact a flawed model and increasingly difficult for a company to be successful with. You need to add some other value beyond servicing the open source software to make it.

This is a huge turn around from the conventional wisdom of years past. Too many people looked at Red Hat and pointed to their support for Linux as the reason for their success. But as Stuart points out, Red Hats success is in providing software that works on top of the stable Linux kernel. If Red Hat had to subsist on just supporting Linux, it would be no where near the company it is today. Of course Red Hat is just one example. There are many, many other companies that embraced the software is free, sell them support model and it remains to be seen if they will fail or succeed.

Even the normally viewed as a success MySQL is not a lock to return the billion dollars that Sun invested in it. Software, whether it be open or closed source, according to Stuart is a commodity. What a company does on top of this is where it gets interesting Cohen says. Collaboration is the real key for Cohen. He says that aspect of open source development is what is really valuable.

I agree with Stuart. I think SaaS is the new open source. I also think that eventually we will see the same thing with SaaS. Just hosting the software for the customer is not going to be enough. You have to add value over and above that as well.

These tough economic times are going to be brutal on marginal business models. Nice to have is not going to cut it. If you can't show why what your company has is a must have and they must have it from you, you are going to have trouble surviving. In the meantime, the good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singin' ....