John Graham

With the increasing popularity of open source, companies of all sizes have been asking how best to leverage open source, how to differentiate commercial products from potential open source substitutes, and how to react to commoditization in particular software areas. Implicit in many of these discussions is that open source represents a force different than those traditionally covered in strategic, market and economic analysis. In this talk we will argue that open source is explained by common mechanisms, and hence we can leverage knowledge accumulated in these fields to understand and predict the impact of open source on commercial products. Drawing on a rich set of examples from Eclipse open source projects, we will discuss issues such as:

• How standard strategic, market and economic analysis extends to open source
• How the scope of an Eclipse project is shaped by forces corresponding to market and regulatory pressures
• The type and organization of the market of Eclipse open source projects
• When voluntary participation in standardization effort offers advantages, and when it is better to diverge
• How network effects appear in Eclipse, and how they can be leveraged by commercial products
• Why intentionally proposing a project that will stall provides a strategic advantage

John has been developing enterprise software for ten years, and has been with Sybase for the past five. His academic background includes a Masters degree from the University of HawaiÂ’i concentrating on computational properties of formal and natural languages, and post-graduate training in business. He has worked on enterprise application integration technologies, web services tooling, distributed systems, machine learning, and service-oriented platforms. A developer on Eclipse since version 1, John served on the Eclipse Consortium executive committee, and then later as the Sybase project lead for the Eclipse Data Tools Platform project.