Open source has crossed the chasm and is heading straight for the tornado. In this keynote address from the Open Source Business Conference 2005, Geoffrey Moore proposes a marriage between the capitalist community, which is inherently competitive, and the open source community, which supports voluntary collaboration and cooperation.

In a place where the laws of evolution guarantee that today's competitive advantage will be tomorrow's commodity and the time between advantage to commoditization is shrinking the collaborative essence of the open source community offers some respite and relief. Geoffrey Moore suggests that competitors should engage the open source community to manage the commonality across the industry. Commonality is fundamentally anything that does not differentiate competitors or does not provide a competitive advantage. The rewards for adopting this strategy is that resources, which were previously working on commonality, can be repurposed to work on value creating activities.

Geoffrey also talks about the challenge of managing mission critical context, which is critical to a company's operation but does provide it with a competitive advantage. He discusses the five levers (centralize, standardize, modularize, automate and outsource) and how they apply to open source.

The message is loud and clear: Identify the value creating activities in your value chain and keep them under control because they are core to your competitive advantage. Additionally, define the the non-core activities and identify how to leverage the collaborative capabilities of the open source community to manage them.

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Geoffrey Moore is a managing director with TCG Advisors and founder of The Chasm Group. He is the author of "Crossing the Chasm," "Inside the Tornado," "The Gorilla Game" (with co-authors Tom Kippola and Paul Johnson), and most recently "Living on the Fault Line," each of which deals with a set of management or investor challenges posed by fast-changing, technology-enabled markets. He is a frequent contributor to business periodicals and a speaker at industry conferences.

Geoffrey is a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, providing strategy advice and consulting services across MDV's entire portfolio of early-stage investments. He is also on the boards of Documentum and Gyration.

Resources:

• Slides from this presentation (PDF)

This program is from the Open Source Business Conference 2005 series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Jim Alateras
• Post-production audio engineer: Bruce Sharpe