One industry to rule them all

November 3, 2008

Every time I take another dabble in the open source world I am amazed at the depth and breadth of truly top quality software available at absolutely no charge. I’m developing a new project that requires some enterprise quality infrastructure, so I took a good look at the Spring framework, Apache project, and the Open Symphony project… Now I’ve used some of their products before (as well as several vendor frameworks) but these tools are now almost plug-n-play good.

Excuse the technical jargon, but Spring MVC + Spring security + Spring Web Services + Spring Batch w/Quartz + Apache tiles + ActiveMQ + Hibernate/Ibatis + Tomcat + Apache webserver + postgreSQL/MySQL + Linux….FOR FREE! Are you kidding me? And that’s just the java world! What about perl, python and php and their respective frameworks. The cost of funding new internet startups continues to fall and the quality of tools and sites continues to rise. Many try, most fail, but everyone dusts themselves off, lessons learned in hand, and gives it another go. I wish all markets had such a low barrier to entry, this is truly the free market on steroids – massive competition with the winners profiting and the losers going bust.

I used to be pessimistic about the future prospects of internet startups in a world of tight credit because we seem to jump from bubble to bubble with little time to relax, and let’s face it, when you have to choose between lending money to farmers and gizmahoooba.com, it’s obvious who will win. But now I’m warming to the belief that nothing will kill this industry. People will self-fund, they will work part-time, they will continue to innovate. It’s too easy, it’s too tempting. There are still many paper processes to digitize and powerful smart phones have only just begun to gain mass appeal…. the opportunities are endless.

I would not be surprised if the next “game changing” idea emerges (once again) from this space. All other industries should sit down and take notes, software for the internet is an unstoppable train, one industry to rule them all.