Open Source’s 2014: MS ‘cancer’ embrace, NASDAQ listings, and a quiet dog

Ho hum. Another year, another slew of open source announcements that prove the once-maligned development methodology is now so mainstream as to be tedious. Running most of the worlds most powerful supercomputers? Been there, done that. Giving retailers the ability to deliver highly customized paper coupons to consumers based on warehouse inventory nearby? So 2013!

And yet in 2014 we had a few events in open source that managed to surprise us, and suggest an even brighter future.

The biggest open source news of 2014 actually isnt. News, that is. As Red Hat storage executive Neil Levine opines, the dog that didn't bark in 2014 was the fact that "no major enterprise platform launched this year that wasn't built with [open source software]".

In fact, as Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson declares: No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form. Even proprietary platforms such as Amazon Web Services are built almost entirely from open source components.

Which is why its so significant that we got our first open source IPO since 2007, when security vendor Sourcefire went public on the back of the popular Snort project. Prior to Sourcefire only two other open source companies made it to the public markets, both in 1999: Red Hat and VA Linux.

Of those three open source vendors, only one remains as a public company: Red Hat. VA Linux imploded soon after its offering, and Sourcefire was acquired by Cisco in 2013.

Which is all the more reason to celebrate the arrival of Hortonworks, which soared to a billion-dollar valuation on its first day of public trading (after falling from its previous billion-dollar valuation on the private markets).

While its nice that the IPO made its executives rich(er) - many of them made millions as part of the JBoss and SpringSource acquisitions by Red Hat and VMware, respectively - the real importance of Hortonworks IPO is that it paves the way for many more open source companies to become independent peers to Red Hat.

Linus Law: Given a large enough beta-tester

and co-developer base, almost every problem

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Open Source's 2014: MS 'cancer' embrace, NASDAQ listings, and a quiet dog